Greetings from the Performing Arts Department! We are hard at work rehearsing the Elementary 1B performance of Homer’s classic tale The Odyssey.  The tale has been adapted and updated to fit our modern audience, but still retains the integrity of the original. Parents of E1B students are encouraged to help their children memorize their lines! The performances will be @ 10 am and 1 pm on Wednesday, November 11^th at the Younger Generation Players Theatre, which is located @ 2701 W. Oxford Avenue, #3 in Sheridan, Colorado, about 10 minutes from Mackintosh. The entire community is invited to this event!

 In our EC classes the students are working on learning songs and finger plays about work and the different ways that we organize ourselves in our communities, including the song Did You Ever See a Worker? In our Primary 2 class, we are looking at the concept question “How is music  organized” and learning basic rhythm patterns, such as the difference between quarter and eighth notes. Beginning this week, students will be learning how to play Sol and Mi on their mallet instrument. Once they master that technique, they will combine the rhythm with the notes and begin to play full songs.

 Finally, the Middle Years 1 class is beginning their new unit with the Unit Question: “How has American popular culture (and by extension, all of Western Culture) been shaped by the Africans who came to the New World as slaves?” The students will begin a 6 week exploration of blues music and how it has influenced American culture. We will be examining this unit through the Area of Interaction of Environments, as we will be asking how culture has influenced these blues musicians. This unit will culminate with a summative project where the students will create their own blues pieces on an instrument and perform them for the rest of the Middle Years classes.

The students are also working on the following Shakespeare Quote of the Week, from the play Macbeth:

Is this a dagger I see before me?

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use.

 [A bell rings]

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell. (October 9)

Macbeth

Macbeth

II,i

Please feel free to contact me with any questions!

Mr. P