I hope
everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!
During our last few days before break, students wrote the following
articles about what has been happening with our class.
Chinese Brush Stroke
By Bella
Recently in Art, our class has been
working on Chinese brush strokes. You use a paint brush with a bamboo handle
and animal or human hair for the brush. The brush starts out really thin at the
bottom and gets thicker as it goes up toward the handle. For this type of
painting there is an ink stone. You use a palette with water on it, rub
the stone on the palette and it turns into ink. This is what is used to
paint. These paintings are frequently of bamboo and animals. There
were a lot of frogs in our class!
After making our paintings
we applied watercolor to them and created poems to go with our pictures.
The format used was a haiku. A haiku is a three lined poem based on
syllables. We have also done some haikus in class for our watercolors of
rain. Our paintings and poems can be
seen in the hallways at school.
Student
Leadership
By: Sofia –and- Caroline
Last week in student leadership we made little “we are thankful”
notes for everyone in the school. They
said things like, “We are thankful that you are a great friend”. We did
this so that the kids in our school would have better thoughts and confidence
in themselves. We also added little turkey stickers on the notes to liven
it up a little.
Recently, we had our student leaders run our second school store!
Some of you may think the school store is unnecessary and a waste of time
and money but we don’t make much money and we don’t care about that. We
think the school store is more about teaching us responsibilities in the real
world. We have just added brand new school t-shirts to our store inventory.
On the front they say,
“East Montpelier Elementary School,” and on the back they say, “Don’t
Forget To Be Awesome.” These shirts come in three different colors,
Pink, Green, and Grey. We have sizes from Youth, Adult-small, and large.
Music
By: Veronica
In music class we’re doing ukuleles and learning different chords like: F
chord, C7, B, A, G, G7 and C. We play different songs and learn different songs
with the ukuleles. Also, we sometimes use rods to play a game and do different
4 beat patterns. Whenever someone has the discolored stick, the others have to
copy it back. Every day the music teacher has to check our ukuleles and tune
them. Then we get to play. Sometimes we have five minutes to figure out how to
play a new song on our ukuleles. Then learn how to play it the right way.
We also split into groups if we want to figure out how to play the
song on the board with our ukes. Now we’re learning how to play Mary Had
a Little Lamb, and how to play it is pretty confusing. We have music every
Thursday in the mornings before P.E and we have music once a week. Other songs
we’ve learned are: Michael Finnegan, Up Down, The Wheels on The bus, Hot
Cross Buns and others as well.
That’s the music blog about the
end of Aug. to the beginning of Thanksgiving in November.
Technology
By Henry & Aaren
PSA’s
For the past month, in
Technology class, all ⅚ classes have worked on
PSA’s. We were assigned partners and gave input on a topic to base our PSA on.
We had a wide variety of options to make our video with. Some of these were:
WeVideo, Lego Movie Maker, and iPad filmed skits. We could also use props to
enhance our film. Every few classes we took a Google Survey for Ms. Arlyn to
see how far along we were. Since we only have technology on Wednesday and
Friday, we missed quite a few classes. Soon, we should be done making scenes,
and editing them with WeVideo. And we
will all have our finished PSA’s soon!
P.E - Volleyball
By Duncan and Daniel
In P.E., we have been doing a Volleyball unit.
We also sat around a lot to learn about volleyball. In volleyball you have a
net separating two sides. You are not allowed to catch the ball or hit the ball
under the net, also you can’t use your feet. You try to hit the ball over the
net and have it hit the ground in their territory.
We have been learning how to set the ball which
is when you put your hands over your head and use your finger tips to hit the
ball. We also learned how to bump, bumping is when the ball is coming with
higher velocity, and the force of the ball is enough for the ball to go back
over the net. When you are bumping, you stick both arms out and then you
connect your hands so the ball will hit your forearms. Lastly, spiking is
when you jump in the air and you hit the ball down, your arm is usually over
the net.
Winter Weeds- Nature Journaling
Cara and Selah
Last Friday, our class went outside for nature journaling. We went over to the
rec field and looked for winter weeds. During the time we were outside, we
learned that some weeds shelter bugs during the winter. Specifically,
goldenrods shelter gall flies. Karen, our nature journaling teacher, told us
that in the Fall, female gall flies will lay their eggs on the goldenrod
plants. Then the larva move around and make the goldenrod swell. This
forms a gall in the plant where the egg was laid. While we were outside Karen
opened some of the galls and we saw the larva moving around.
We found a lot of cool bugs, some of which had a red V on their wings. Another
bug that was found was small and bright green. Both were very jumpy, and some
students picked them up. These bugs liked to stay on people’s hands once they
were picked up.
Everyone found different kinds of weeds, but one was really cool.
It was black, and had lots of seeds the size of a Rice Crispy. Each of
the seeds looked kind of like a heart shaped flake. The plant was about 3 feet
tall or one yard tall. The plants were not in bunches but were all over the
edge of the rec field.
