Specials are Spot On
2nd Grade December News
Physical Education
Hi everybody!
We hope the fall season allowed you to spend time outside exercising and playing as a family and enjoying the great weather! In November our second grade students worked with the parachute, focusing on cooperative activities and core/upper body strength. We also used the scooters, again working on our upper body strength, as well as our lower body strength. The children also played “scooter soccer” which they love, as they exert a ton of energy without realizing it at the time.
We continue to really focus on our push up and sit technique, as we prepare the children for the CT State Fitness Testing (grades 4, 6, 8, and 10). We also practice for our third grade Fitness Clubs. The Fitness Club activities we have practiced so far are: mile run/distance running, flexibility/sit and reach, short and long jump ropes, hula hoops, jumping sticks, skip-its, pull/chin ups, sit ups, and push ups. We have several more Fitness Clubs scheduled during the winter and spring months. We started ball skills with the hands and basketball skills and skills games just after Thanksgiving break and should finish up just after Christmas vacation, more on that in our next newsletter.
We constantly work to improve our level of aerobic fitness, balance, coordination, strength, power, and flexibility, during our warm ups, and with our class activity each lesson/class. Our goal is to constantly raise that level of fitness and confidence and make each child become more aware of the importance of being healthy, fit, and comfortable in all that they do each day. We hope your child looks forward to their PE classes each week and we hope they share with you all that we do in our classes.
Take care, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!
Coach Boscarino and Coach Ruel
Art
In second grade the students have been very excited as they learned how to create puppets and their very own puppet shows! Students used cut paper and glue to design a multi-layered puppet that fit into a setting they created. Settings were so creative and some depicted a real place as a farm, or store, while others depicted alien landscapes and underwater cities. Then the students wrote their own fictional scripts/stories and performed their puppet shows behind Ms. Pinto’s puppet show theater! We even watched a video about the most famous puppeteer, Jim Hensen, and how he and his team of artists designed and created their puppets!
Students also are learning about LANDSCAPES! We looked at famous landscapes by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Ernst Kirchner. The students looked at each of these landscapes closely to decide how the artists showed a large, wide open SPACE. They determined that overlapping and changing the size of an object would make things appear up close or far away. They were beyond excited to finally see how that illusion creates a three dimensional place on a piece of paper! They then learned the traditional way of “stacking” sections, starting with the “HORIZON LINE”, and then creating a foreground, middleground, and background for their own winter landscapes. The students are completing these amazing landscapes with paint and will continue practicing their painting skills; beginning with painting the large places first, and then small.
For more information please visit the art webpage here.
UPDATE: ART TO REMEMBER order forms will be arriving the week after winter break. Keep your eyes out for them, they will be sent home in students backpacks. Any orders placed will help greatly to support the cultural and fine art program at Memorial Elementary School!
Miss Pinto and Miss Fausette
Music
In the past month, second graders have worked hard to practice their new music skills! They focused on their new rhythm, the half note, by reading it in songs, writing it in various ways, recognizing patterns that contain it, and using it to compose. They practiced having “rhythm conversations”, where they improvise a music pattern as an “answer” to my music “question”. They also began a composing project in groups, where they worked to compose an accompaniment to a song we learned in class and then selected rhythm instruments to use with their composition. The final step will be to perform for the class! Our next focus is on a new mystery note, which is a note lower than mi, sol, and la on our solfege staircase! Stay tuned! As always, please visit the music room website for updates!
Mrs. Maldonado
Library Media
Second grade students have spent the last month participating in library centers with Mrs. Flannery. All centers supported our work that we have been doing on digital citizenship. Centers ranged from becoming more familiar with the keyboard; taking the Webonaut's challenge on PBS kids; learning about the Cyber Five of online safety; identifying appropriate online behaviors and unsafe behaviors; and distinguishing between the URL bar and the search bar. In January we will move into our unit on coding.
With Mrs. Hill, students listened to the following:
Phineas L. MacGuire Gets Cooking by Frances O'Roark (Nutmeg nominee)
Mother Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins
Gaston by Kelly DiPucchio
For more information, please visit our library website or follow us on Twitter.
Mrs. Flannery and Mrs. Hill
P.E.
P.E.
Library
The Specials Team
Email: rflannery@easthamptonct.org
Website: www.easthamptonps.org
Location: Memorial School, Smith Street, East Hampton, CT, United States
Phone: 8603654020
Facebook: facebook.com/MemorialElementarySchool
Twitter: @EHPublicSchools