Week Ending 10/19/18

BREAK A LEG, DURFEE!

And special luck and thanks to Lara Beth Terry and her team for pulling this event off every year!

In the News This Week:

The Fine and Performing Arts Learning Walk for grades 6-12 happened this week. I will share pictures here, and the report in this week's email. Thank you to all who were visited on Wednesday and Thursday. A learning walk gives us a snapshot into what types of tasks we plan for our kids across the district, and the hope is that teachers can read the report and learn on a large scale what colleagues are doing.
We have several UMASS Dartmouth Students working with our art and music staff as they get their observation hours in- this year, they are allowed to interact with students and assist in the classroom, and we love that! Thank you to all who have accepted a UMD Student into your classrooms. They will learn so much from you!
Kerin McGillicudy shared a really cool website that sets up a really cool screen for you to guide your class, complete with a timer, a noise level detector and everything! Check it out! https://www.classroomscreen.com/
It's so good to listen to the Band and Orchestra teachers talk about how the general music teachers at the elementary schools are "plugging" kids into their programs! Kudos to Jayson Newell, Susan Glaser and others (forgive me if I don't list you all here!) who have connected our kids to the band and orchestra! Jay and Susan, you put the COOL in Community School!

Help with Lesson Planning:

Check out this easy to use search engine for access to your Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks: http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/search/SubjectSearch.aspx
This site lets you choose your content, and then the strand- after that, simply hit search and copy paste your frameworks into your lessons.

Arts Literacy Section:

Because one of our goals is to engage students in arts literacy, I would like to post weekly supports and articles to get you thinking about new tasks to plan, or new strategies... Here goes!
Check out this SUPER COOL IDEA: It's a short video, and you can TOTALLY do this through the use of your GMAIL HANGOUTS if you want to collaborate with another art teacher across the district! If you want to do it within your class, you can do that too! Check it out! Arts Literacy Lesson Link
Let me know if you try this one and how it went!

The Week in Pictures!

Here are some pics from this week's learning walk, and a few others!

Mr. Bigelow makes his daily expectations very clear to students and uses Google Classroom to convey content!

Ms. Laprise works super duper hard with her hundreds of students, here with high schoolers who so admire her work and skill!

Percussion students work under Mr. Ollivierre during weekly sectional practice and they sound aaamazing!

Trumpet, anyone? Mr. Treloar's kids are honing in on the skills they need to SLAY it!

Ms. Zema's intro to piano students went from zero to 100 this term! They can actually play pieces and read music!

Who's that guy with the mallet? It's Mr. O! Intro to percussion kids working in unison- good stuff!

Talbot art work, showing use of foreground, middle and background in Ms. Cabral's class! Viva!

An example saved from last year's Arts Expo

Morton 6th graders- YES, 6th graders! They were so focused on their work, working at their own pace through the piano text! Ms. Gardner also had a diagram for them on the board!