Batteries Not Included

This morning, the students led Mrs. Veenstra through our opening ritual of the bow, attendance-taking, and vocal/physical warm ups...because I was late due to a dead car battery. Fortunately, the students knew exactly what to do, and I was only ten minutes late to our class. Many thanks to Mrs. Veenstra for stepping in.

In Drama, we focused on physicalizing and pantomime, and "doing something two ways." For example: The act of washing a dog. First, as a professional dog groomer; next, as a person who is afraid of dogs. Through our work, students were encouraged to be clear in their actions, so we, the audience could understand what they were doing, and they were also encouraged to be creative and think in different ways, in order to show how they were approaching their action.

Our Language Arts and Science classes today both used A Wrinkle in Time as a basis for our activities. In Language Arts, students were given five "starters" for creative story writing, based on characters/situations from L'Engle's book. Like last week, these stories were practice for writing well-written, complete sentences, full-bodied paragraphs, and fully-realized short stories with a beginning, middle and an end.

Based on the character, IT - "a disembodied brain...an oversized brain...a living brain," we turned our attention to the brain (leaving the topic of "water" behind for the day). Just as IT controlled the people of Camazotz, the students learned how our brains control our bodies. We were going to watch a very cool video about magic and the brain, but we were unable to connect our computer with the Smart Board (not so smart, huh?). Apparently, the problem is now solved, and we will have the opportunity to watch the video tomorrow.

In our reading, we learned that one of the ways to "take care" of the brain is to exercise it - through riddles, puzzles and games. So each group of clustered tables embarked on a few rounds of "Concentration" in order to hone memory skills.

Going home to "recharge" for tomorrow. Hope you are all doing the same.

Cheers,
Ms. Pitman