Thursday, May 19, 2016

A day for the arts...

Today distance a room through it got deep into the arts. Starting off with our regular Thursday morning music class, the students learned according to song stand by me which were going to present later in the year as part of the whole school presentation. It has become very apparent to both Owen Glossop and myself that all of the work at the school in music has paid off in the current group of junior students.  On many occasions this year they were able to grab a song and play it with very little difficulty after only one or two attempts.






Tuesdays and Thursdays are dancemania days for DPA.  Here are some shots of our class getting into the groove with the whole school.










Today we had a special visit from Jennifer B, who worked at Churchill as a French teacher last year when Lise retired.  She is the arts coach for the board, and she came to teach a workshop on dance, that was inspired by Indonesian hand dancing.  After our session with her, and the students from Alena's class, we had a group sharing in the gym to perform a collective dance with the whole school.  It was a magical moment. 
In between all of this...we dove deeply into coordinate number systems, graphing points on a Cartesian plane, and examination of the Linnaean system of classification, and the digestive system...and that was all fun too...but the artsy stuff is what stood out from the day.











Link for Five Kingdoms

http://www.kidsbiology.com/biology_basics/five_kingdoms_life/classification1.php

Friday, May 13, 2016

Dancing with the bees and photography

The Gees Bees visit was an informative one of the class.  Here are some photos of the students mixing it up while performing a honey locating dance.





The students explored the use of macro settings when focusing on subjects in a photograph.  During their breakout session they roamed the schoolyard looking for interesting subjects to test their understanding on.  We will see the full results of their work during next weeks session, but the early peeks at what they captured revealed some really fantastic images.