Glad You Are Here!
1 02 2008I want to talk about the decision to keep schools in Chicago open today, but I’m going to try and keep this positive for now. Let me just say that although it was wrong to keep school open today, I am glad to see that many students did make it.
The 3rd graders are just about finished with their puppets. The students are going to create mini-plays within their table groups to perform for each other. Also, Mr. Brown is working on setting up a time for the kids to perform their plays in front of the Pre-K or Kindergarten students. That should be the fun part.
I’m sure the 4th graders were happy this week to begin working on their global warming public service announcements this week. Above, you will see a couple pictures of the students in action. After a few weeks of preparing them to make the videos by learning about global warming, they were put in groups this week to start brainstorming ideas. Ms. Walsh and I really stressed that they used this time to come up with different ideas and now get too bogged down just yet on how they were going to make the video. We wanted them to let their ideas really flow and not be constrained just yet with all the technicalities of making the video. Next week, we will be talking more about specifics.
All of the 5th grade students are done with the foamcore houses and we are moving on to hip hop and breakbeats now. Since we had a low turnout today, we did not get to start talking about hip hop with Mr. Rowell’s class, but Mr. Bynum’s class had a history lesson into the origin of the breakbeat and began learning how to make a breakbeat using an audio editing software called Audacity.
The 6th graders are just about finished with their stop animation videos. We are going to take a short hiatus from the animation videos during the next couple weeks because we are going to start working on mosaics that are going to eventually be put up on the underpass between the Museum of Science and Industry and the lake. We are working with an artist to create these mosaics, and she is scheduled to come in next week.
Also, just wanted to say that we are almost half way through Saturday Academy as of this coming Saturda. The students are making “dub video” using Adobe Premiere Elements. I know it is sometimes difficult to come in every Saturday, so I’m happy that so many students make a point to come in on the weekend.
Until next week…
