Fall Session Week 2

Kindergarten Spanish:

"Verano-Summer, Otono-Autumn,Invierno-Winter, Primavera-Spring. Each season has a song to sing." We've added a new song snippet from Lyric Language about the seasons onto our traditional class starters. Kindergarten had fun exploring the seasons this week. We learned and acted out weather expressions, dressed Senor Oso (Mr. Bear) for each season, and colored a leaf picture with the appropriate Spanish colors. Although Tennessee has four distinct seasons, we talked about the rainforests of South America which don't have the same seasons and the leaves of the trees don't change colors. The childred enjoyed hearing The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry. We ended our class by reviewing the word "calabaza-pumpkin," and playing a game of "hot calabaza!"

B1-2 Technology:

We have a new keyboarding game to start each class this session-Keyboard Climber.

This game is fun, but very challenging for many of the students. We talked about the importance of using the right hand for each letter and that the idea of practice is to do their personal best, not to beat the game the first try(or ever!) Following keyboarding, we jumped right into our pumpkin theme activities for the week. After a few minutes of carving virtual pumpkins and clicking/dragging pumpkin faces, we listened to our "guest speaker" tell us some pumpkin facts.

The video was done with Crazy Talk, a cool program we will explore later in the year. Armed with our pumpkin knowledge, we were now ready to tackle Pumpkin Math, a powerpoint inspired by Kevin Jarrett and others. Students click,drag, and type to manipulate a powerpoint which I will print out as a minibook to bring home later next week.

3-4 Technology:

The Monster Exchange is in full swing! This week students tested their monster descriptions with a class partner and typed them in Microsoft Word. Some students realized that their descriptions lacked important details or clear instructions and a lot of editing needed to be done!Everything should be posted to the website next week for our out-of-state partners to redraw. We should have our partners' pictures to redraw by Thanksgiving.