Hi!

Hi All!
I received my Summer Session at Eastman and thought of you all (although I think of you more than that!)
It's been a busy busy year with a the art teacher and I collaborating on a new elementary drama club, 5th grade musical (Wizard of Oz) rehearsals, set construction, etc underway..., concerts galore, HS musical: Anything Goes, and and and...

I adopted a rescue dog from Texas in January...AND am the proud mother of Penelope (a new baby goat!) Penelope came to school with me on Friday before break. Hopefully this works, but you should be able to see the video I took from the Kindergarten class. We have been working on M,R,D patterns-so they wrote the words and picked the patterns for the song. In the video-they are singing it themselves..such angels. Although I have to say usually this class has a few boys and girls who like to cause trouble, but with the goat there, they were indeed angels.

It has been a fun year incorporating all sorts of ideas from the summer. We started the year off with Welcome Here-and the kids LOVED it. We also did a Farmer Went Trotting...and I shared the next two verses with them (I believe we only focused on the first verse words) the kids got a huge kick out of it.

We are on a literacy kick this year, so I started doing music journals with my 4th and 5th graders. These include entries such as what we did in the summer-responding to activities we did in class, describing the process (great for review!) Listening activities, drawing pictures to match form, etc. Successful so far! Now when I ask them to do a journal article, no one complains! It was great to learn more about the kids too-their involvement with music in their outside world.

We just finished writing Haiku poems about pictures from nature (which we had used for movement activities previously) then set the poems to music (using are improvising techniques on instruments from Do-and stepping around to Sol, etc.) We have Sibelius on every computer in our elementary lab, so after break we will explore notation software and make our handwritten compositions digital. Fun!

Sad that Level III is a whole year away...I hope you are all doing well! It is break week-but I'm off to school to build more sets and rehearse for the musical(s).

Hope to hear from you all!!
Laurianne