Music and Art

We started our music program today with Mr. Richard Lawton. This is the music program which is funded by Friends of Third. Most of the students worked with Mr. Lawton last year. This year he is only working with third through fifth graders and is also starting an ensemble program. You can find out details of his program by checking his blog, thirdstreetmusic.blogspot.com. Mr. Lawton began with teaching the students a fun, but rather challenging round. They will continue working on this for several weeks. They used this song and its lyrics to explore beat and rhythm. This complemented many of the activities we have done in class here nicely. We will be following up in class on a composition assignment he gave the students.

We did a number of other routine things: we checked and corrected a couple homework assignments, we read and discussed the second chapter of Island of the Blue Dolphins, and we did some followup work on "Mae Jemison." We studied our final thinking map, the Bridge Map, which focuses on analogies. We discussed simple analogies like "puppy is to dog as kitten is to cat" and discussed what a relating factor is. The students were then challenged to think, "Who takes care of me?" and "Who do I take care of?" They made a bridge map out of this and then created a short composition which will conclude their All About Me book. We will be doing our last couple final drafts here and binding them in the next couple days. They will be on their desks for Back-to-School Breakfast later this month.

Thursday is Art Day in room 19, and we built on our work in line and contour this week. As you can see above, students again used pen and ink to create a contour drawing. This time they were allowed to look at their paper, though they were encouraged to spend more time looking at our still life. For our still life I took a variety of ethnic percussion instruments and place them on top of a plastic tub so that they could be seen more easily. The students really got the idea of looking at the edges to create the shapes of the different objects. I think you'll agree that they did a wonderful job here.

Homework: This seems longer and more complicated than it really is. Plus, they had time to get started on assignments in class. (1) Do the spelling wordsearch. The test is tomorrow. (2) Do the four pages of the Open Court packet. They are "Jemison Vocabulary" and "Long Vowel Patterns," "Main Idea and Detail," "Types of Sentences" and "Features of Biographies." This sounds like a lot more than it really is. Most of these can be done quite quickly. (3) Do "Collect and Organize Data," Math, pages 83-85, numbers 1-23 only.