Humanities Weekly Update
May 2nd, 2021
Dear WHES Families,
Music!
We will finish recording and taking pictures for our school musical, “Good Thinking: A Musical Conversation About Character” this week. I’ve really enjoyed listening to the kids singing, and since I have to record each voice individually, I’m really impressed with how brave and confident they have been to sing alone in front of their classes.
We are working on music composition with 3rd-5th graders and they will need to save and submit their work through Quaver music, so if they have not set up their account yet, I will repost the code for their class’ account on their Google Music stream. They can find Quaver Music already loaded on their Chromebooks.
Be sure to check the Google Music stream for more fun music games and activities. I post the slides from each week’s lesson with the links to these activities.
Library!
Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd graders study sea creatures in library. We’ll learn about some cool octopus facts and read Also an Octopus by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Benji Davies. This fiction book is really a story about stories. We’ll be coming up with ideas for what happens next with Octopus, the book’s main character.
3rd, 4th, and 5th graders are continuing with their Scratch projects. Scratch is a visual coding language, which lets people with no computer programming experience easily code. Our first project is to animate a name or a word. Ask your young scholars to share their Scratch program with you.
Art!
This week in Art (April 26 - April 30):
K-4 learned about symmetry and asymmetry and created beautiful butterflies.
5th Grade continued learning more about contour lines, and created icons to decorate the Fifth Grade Community Pantry flyer.
Please help remind your children to please post their artwork in their Artsonia online portfolio. Artsonia is a gallery of student art portfolios where students have been posting their artwork all school year. Not only is it a great way for students to keep track of their art, but it is also a great way for students to see their progress, helps me send them feedback, and it offers products you can order with your child’s artwork on it. Fun fact: some of the funds goes towards our art program where I will use it to help purchase materials for students in need. So far we have raised $90.03 for materials. Yay! If you or your child need help logging in to Artsonia, please watch this video attached or you can go to your childs Google Art Classroom and look for the written steps in the CLASSWORK on how to download your child’s artwork. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppDv8bnKQR0 Student Access Code: WSPB-ZXDZ Check out this beautiful butterfly by Kimba, a Kindergarten student.
Check out our ebooks!
I'm looking forward to getting some extended reading time over spring break. Take a look at the ebooks students can check out and read over break (or any time!)
Students can use their RPS ID and password to log into Destiny to check out and read books.