First Graders have been busy in the library!  We have been reading and identifying NONFICTION books, and will soon begin our BIOGRAPHY unit!  In the technology lab students have been using our new PEBBLEGO online database.  Students are becoming experts at logging in, and locating and recording information. They are now on to PowerPoint to share their research through a digital presentation.

www.pebblego.com 

 Second grade art program focuses on learning and utilizing the elements of art:  color, line, shape, texture and space.  January’s focus has been COLOR.  The students are not only learning about primary and secondary colors, but also use those colors to create tertiary colors.  They have been introduced to complementary and analogous colors as well as creating tints and shades.  They can also group warm, cool, and neutral colors.  Some of these concepts have been used and displayed in their current project: Pine Tree Paintings:  Winter Landscape.     

Kindergarten students are developing their sense of and ability to recognize and perform steady beat accurately.  They are working combining expressive qualities (tempo: fast/slow, dynamics: loud/quiet, melody: higher pitches/lower pitches) when singing short songs. They are also listening to music so that they can analyze what instruments are playing, who is singing (voice quality), and explain/describe how we know what instruments are playing and/or who is singing.

The gym is being filled with balls being volleyed all over the place. Our unit this month is Volleyball.  The fourth graders are improving on their skills to get ready for the blue and gold volleyball game against teachers and students.  Skills being taught are Setting, Serving and bumping.  For the younger children, a big beach ball is used, as they try to keep it up for as many times as they can.  This is a sport that not many children have an opportunity to play because their are no organized town teams.  We have some really good volleyball players. I have seen alot of growth in them from 1st grade to 4th.
Third grade students just finished up their first unit in Spanish class, “Yo Soy Especial/I am Special.” They did a fabuloso job on their class presentations and just finished reflecting on what they learned. They will be bringing home a “Stamp Sheet” next week… please ask your child to share it with you and see if they can show off their Spanish! They might be able to tell you their birthday, adjectives to describe themselves or even describe their hair and eyes to you! We will be starting our second unit, “Mi Vida Loca/My Crazy Life,” next week. Students will learn to tell time as well as practice phrases and sentences in Spanish to speak about their daily schedule, classes, activities and people in their lives.  

In this first marking period, the first graders reviewed the names of and played a wide variety of classroom percussion instruments: rhythm sticks, hand drums, lollipop drums, triangles, glockenspiels, woodblocks, guiros, xylophones, maracas, boomwhackers, tambourines, and rain sticks. Ask them about the unusual instruments - whistle tubes and thunder tubes  - that we used in The Weather Song.  They used  the instruments listed above to highlight texts of poems (called soundscapes) and to accompany songs with a steady beat.  

First graders listened to and identified dynamics (levels of loudness) of short music excerpts with English and Italian terms (piano = quiet, mezzo-forte = medium loud, forte = loud).  They experienced  and verbally identified tempo (speed) of short music selections with English and Italian terms (adagio = slow; moderato = medium; allegro = fast).  

First graders can identify a series of pitches as “mostly high” (not loud) or “mostly low” (not quiet).  They can tell which pitch of 2 pitches is the higher (or lower) one.  We played this game to hone our pitch skills: Piggies High/Low Pitch Game.

They also sang quite a bit as we learned holiday and winter songs for our annual holiday concert on Friday, December 19, 2014.  Click on this link if you need the holiday concert information: Hilltop Holiday Concerts. Happy Holidays!  

OUR HILLTOPERS ARE WORKING HARD ON THEIR EYE-HAND COORDINATION. WE ARE ALL FOCUSING ON USING OUR FINGERTIPS TO DRIBBLE A BALL.  THE FOURTH GRADERS ARE PREPARING TO LEARN HOW TO PLAY AGAINST EACH OTHER IN A 3 ON 3 BASKETBALL GAME. THE YOUNGER GRADES ARE LEARNING HOW TO DRIBBLE, PASS AND EVEN SHOT AT DIFFERENT LEVEL BASKETS.

I ENCOURAGE THE CLASSES TO WORK ON STRETCHING THEIR BODIES INSIDE IF THE WEATHER IS TOO COLD OR RAINY OUT.  I HAVE TOLD THEM TO DO SIT UPS DURING A COMMERCIAL WHEN THEY ARE WATCHING TV. FOR A MOVIE, PICK OUT A WORD THAT EVERYTIME YOU HEAR IT,DO 10 SITUPS, OR EVEN PUSH UPS.

WE WILL BE READY FOR A LITTLE VOLLEYBALL WHEN WE GET BACK FROM WINTER BREAK

I WISH YOU ALL A HAPPY HOLIDAY FROM YOUR P.E. DEPT.

2nd Graders have begun their state research! We started off with the book How To Make An Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman.  Then students used the USA Map to locate the state of their choice and their capital city.  Students then learned about the United States Census, and navigated to www.census.gov to locate their state's population.  We also have a better understanding of URLs ending in .com , .gov, and .edu.  Students also located and recorded information from the www.factmonster.com website, and will soon be creating digital presentations. 

As the first marking period comes to an end, the Hilltop students are bringing home their art folders.  Please keep the artworks at home, but sign and return the art folders.  We need it for more artworks to come.  Thank you for your support and happy holidays!

The third graders have been practicing and applying the principles of art:  contrast and emphasis, balance and unity, rhythm,pattern and movement.  This month, they have learned that 1) the visual rhythm is the repetition of lines, shapes and colors and 2) how to create a movement in a picture using the visual rhythm.  We have started by listening and identifying  “rhythm”(repetition of beats) in a piece of music and have correlated that concept to understanding what a “visual rhythm” is in an artwork.  By discussing and comparing Op Art artworks of Bridget Riley and the Fishing Boat prints of Hokusai, the third graders have shown me that they have understood what visual rhythm is.  We are currently creating a beautiful winter landscape using the birch trees to create the visual rhythm.