November 26, 2016

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.