A Wondrous Wednesday

Our day began in the auditorium with Mr. Pratt in our theater class. Today we worked some more on our tableau skills. After the usual "Be Our Guest" warm up, Mr. Pratt reviewed the basics of tableau with the students and did a demonstration using three scenes from The Wizard of Oz. He then broke the students into groups, and assigned each group a fairy tale to dramatize. I took pictures of these tableaux later in the day, and this will be working on the film shortly. Coming to a screen near you soon....

In Tech Center, Ms. Richards broke the students in to two groups. One group worked with her assistant, Ms. D., on an introduction to PowerPoint lesson. The other group worked with Ms. Richards. This group was exploring the idea of analogies. The students reviewed analogies using Mr. Anker's wonderful website. These were pretty simple verbal analogies like kitten is to cat as puppy is to dog. Ms. Richards then had the students create visual analogies using the PhotoBooth program on the Macs. You can see an example above. This one is: up is to down as left is to right.

After lunch, we corrected homework. I normally try to be positive, but the math homework was a disaster. Almost none of the kids has a clue about determining elapsed time. We will work on this more in class, of course, but it's an good skill to constantly review with your child at home, too. If a movie starts at 5:00 and ends at 7:10, how long is it? Unlike 4x - 1 = y, this kind of math is really essential for everyday life.

Homework: (1) Do the spelling wordsearch. This is review for the Open Court unit test. (2) Do the "Desert" study questions. Students will need their California history book for this. (3) Do "Sequence Information," Math, page 125, numbers 2-8. (4) Do "Elapsed Time on a Calendar," Math, pages 127-129, all problems.

Also, we will be doing collages tomorrow in Art. Students should bring in old magazines, advertisements, etc to cut up for this.