Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Wednesdays are Special

When I was young, there was was a campaign by some spaghetti sauce company to make Wednesday special because everybody was supposed to eat spaghetti on that day. And the ads featured some little Italian waif running home because he knew that it was Wednesday and that there would be spaghetti. Well, in room 19 we do not need pasta to have a great Wednesday. We have Theater and Tech Center! Those fabulous activities make Wednesdays special for us.

Today in Theater Mr. Pratt introduced the concept of tableau, or theatrical group statues. Although it seems like it would be easier for students than improvisation - after all, you do not have to invent dialogue - fourth graders have a hard time picking a position and staying frozen in it. It's hard for 9 and 10 year olds to not giggle. But tableau is a great tool for story analysis, and Mr. Pratt linked it clearly to identifying the conflict or problem in a story and identifying the exposition, where the problem in introduced, the climax, where the problem reaches its most exciting point, and the resolution, where the problem is finally resolved in some way. Students did a couple different tableaux (yeah, we're even teaching them French plural forms in fourth grade now) and you can see one of them below.

In the Tech Center, Miss D. had the children explore analogies using some of the clever quizzes and other related matters on Henry Anker's website. Mr. Anker is the district ITAF (no, I have no idea what those initials stand for) assigned to our school, and he has been very helpful to the parents who are sponsoring our computer lab. After this, they did their own kind of tableaux using the Photo Booth program making pictures of themselves looking up, down, left, and right.

After lunch, we read and discussed a long chapter of Island of the Blue Dolphins. We went out to PE where we did our warmups, but skipped our laps (just a tad too hot, don't you think?) and then rotated between activities. We returned to the classroom where we corrected homework and I gave them the following light assignments for this evening.

Homework: (1) Do "Choose an Approriate Graph," Math, pages 106-109. Students can skip question 23. (2) Do the music assignment for Mr. Lawton's class tomorrow morning.

Students are highly encouraged, but not required, to watch tonight's debate between Senator Obama and the other guy. Not that I have an opinion here....

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Down with the other guy!
Him and Sarah Something should beat it!!!

Anonymous said...

Oh, good -- now I can post something really useful. UTAF stands for Instructional Technology Applications Facilitator. No wonder Henry goes by UTAF.

Stewart also loves Wednesdays ...

John D Bassett said...

"Applications Facilitator"? On first hearing, it sounds a little medical, doesn't it? But even giving the district the benefit of the doubt here, what exactly does it mean? And how much did somebody get paid to come up with this ridiculous title? Oh well. It's not a stupid as the Mathematics Instructional Guide (MIG, which many of us remember as being Soviet-era nuclear missiles).

Anonymous said...

Danielle Pechthalt

Now, who might that other guy be? HA HA HA!

Anonymous said...

Henry Anker's Website is great, no matter what his title is - I encourage all parents to look at it!

Lynn Kersey (Danielle's mom)

Anonymous said...

Lynn, it’s clear that Stewart and Danielle have been participating in the dialog of this presidential election!

Mr. Bassett, you should check out NEW YORK TIMES columnist David Pogue's recent essay called “Tech Terms to Avoid.”

If you don't already, you might subscribe to his column via email, unless you are already a NYT reader. I'll email you the link.

Since I am one of those high tech PR writers David refers to, I’ve been guilty of swimming in the alphabet soup of high tech jargon for years.

That said, why should I not thrash about in more shame? I hereby acknowledge my erroneous referral to Henry’s acronym as UTAF instead of ITAF.