GRAND AVENUE SPECIALS
April 2018
SPECIALS DEPARTMENTS
Music-Katie Lavigne and Glenn Schuster
Physical Education-Jacob Breunig, Eric Scheunemann, Josh Sheard
Email: contact@saukprairieschools.org
Website: www.saukprairieschools.org
ART
Thank you for helping us celebrate Youth Art Month!
If you were unable to join us for the opening reception of the Youth Art Month art show the artwork will be on display at the River Arts Center through April 17th. The gallery is open on school days until 8 pm and on some weekends if there are special events.
WHAT WE'VE BEEN WORKING ON:
Fifth Grade: During March, fifth grade artists have been working on a self portrait project inspired by Pop Artist Andy Warhol. Artists altered a photograph of themselves on the Chromebooks and then transferred the image to a printing block. After carving the image into the blocks the artists created 3 prints using monochromatic and complementary color schemes.
Third Grade: Artists spent most of March working on the backdrop for their concert. Each artist drew, and designed a hat. We hope that after the concert your student had time to point out what they made! As we transition into April students are working on weaving and a clay project.
Music
The third graders have worked on and performed their concert with great success. Please see photos below of the concert.
The fourth and fifth graders completed their recorder unit. I hope you have asked them to play a song for you. In addition to that, we have touched on music from Japan. The students sang "Try Everything" from Zootopia and "We Know the Way." We also listened to music from "Superman" written by John Williams.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Jump Rope for Heart Update:
With your help we raised $5,000 for the American Heart Association while students gained a better understanding of the importance of heart health and the risk factors associated with heart disease.
The picture below is of our top 5 fundraisers and McKenna Breunig, our Heart Hero this year, who we jumped in honor of. From left to right: Kennedy Breunig, Braden Breunig, Josie Frey, McKenna Breunig, Ava Handschke, and Claire Handschke. They are standing in front of our heart wall where students wrote down someone they personally were jumping in honor of.
- Basketball - We will finish our work on developing our dribbling, passing, and shooting skills.
- Tennis - We will be working on developing our ball control, striking and footwork skills.
- Fitness - We will begin preparing for our second round of fitness assessments. Students will be reminded of their scores from the fall and will be encouraged to try to improve. We have been working on improving our overall fitness throughout the year, now we will assess our progress in these areas. The four components of fitness that we focus on improving are flexibility, muscular endurance, muscular strength, and cardiovascular endurance. We also will look at our recovery and resting heart rates.
Heart Rate Monitor Reminder:
Occasionally parents ask what they should be looking for in the heart rate monitor reports. We look for elevated heart rates during our activity time. Every class period students should at least spend 50% of their time in the yellow, orange and red zones. We also call this moderate or vigorous physical activity (MVPA). Students can challenge themselves to improve their heart health by aiming to get 135 FIT points or a total of 20 minutes or more in the orange and red zones combined. However, there are times we focus on lower heart rates depending upon what we are working on. Also on the heart rate graph we look for peaks and valleys. Healthy hearts recovery quickly so steep valleys are good to see. Students should be able to explain what we were doing in class based on looking at their graph.
The fact that the parents contact us is very encouraging. We enjoy teaching and are passionate about what we do, however what we are doing in class changes each time so our heart rates will be impacted. The goal of sending the heart rate reports home is to encourage communication between teachers and families, families and students, and teachers and students with concrete heart rate data to guide our conversations. Keep encouraging your son or daughter to work hard in Physical Education Class, we appreciate your support.