Benton Specialist Monthly Recap

In the art room, our third through fifth grade students will continue exploring three-dimensional art as they build and shape clay creations. Beyond this, many students will also begin learning how artists tell stories through their artwork by showing characters, settings, and ideas in creative ways.

Our younger artists will focus on putting several skills together through multimedia projects. By combining drawing, painting, cutting, and building, students will discover how different materials and techniques can work together to create something new.

Hello Benton families.  This month in physical education is filled with excitement as we focus on our cup stacking unit, which emphasizes bilateral movement. 

The cup stack club will commence the Wednesday following spring break, and registration is open on a first-come, first-served basis for students in third, fourth, and fifth grades. 

After the break, we will transition into our fitness unit, followed by badminton and archery activities.

Additionally, please mark your calendars for May 18th, as we will host field day for kindergarten through fifth grade.  I would greatly appreciate any assistance, whether for part of the day or the entire event.  Volunteers who commit to staying all day will be treated to complimentary pizza at lunchtime.  Flyers have been distributed regarding volunteer opportunities for field day, but you are also welcome to contact the office for more information.

April has lots of fun in store in music!

5th grade will spend part of April learning about the keyboard.  Each student is able to use their own electronic keyboard to learn to play a basic C scale, as well as simple one handed songs.  The second half of April will be spent learning about composing through video games!  Each student will be creating their own video game, and composing the theme for their game using digital composition software.

4th grade will be ending our Recorder Unit in April.  Students have done so well, and have learned so many notes and songs!  We will also be starting our Hip Hop Unit this month.  Students will learn about the history and pillars of hip hop music, and practice grade level rhythm patterns through hip hop beats.  We will culminate our unit by composing a hip hop back track to rap a rhyming book over!

3rd grade will be learning guitar basics and history, as well as starting our ocarina instrument unit!

2nd grade will be learning to play and compose in 2 and 4 beat meter.

1st grade will be learning to identify unpitched percussion instruments by sight and sound (timbre), and Composing Rhythms and Ostinato patterns in sets of 2.

Kindergarten will continue mastering musical opposites (High/Low, Long/Short, Fast/Slow, Loud/Soft), as well as Combining steady beat with the rhythm of words.

Happy Spring Break and let’s keep wishing for warm weather and sunshine!  In Counseling, we are halfway through our unit on Empathy by making an effort to understand how others feel.  Students practiced being observers, reflecting on how someone might feel in a situation, and using kind words or problem solving skills to help.  Learning about Empathy supports student social emotion growth at home and school. 

Thank you to everyone who helped make our Reading Week a success!  Whether it was by being a guest reader, volunteering at the Book Fair, signing  reading logs, or helping your student(s) find clothes for spirit week, it was all very much appreciated!  Our logs indicated that we read over 10,000 minutes at home that week!

3rd-5th is in the middle of prepping for the MAP test.  I have been pushing in to Media classes to help students solve problems that use test-specific technology tools.  For example, using the digital protractor tool is not very intuitive!  The goal is to get everyone acclimated to these tools so they're not new to us when the real test comes around in mid-April.

FYI, the MAP is structured this way, with separate days for each session:

• 3rd grade - 3 ELA sessions and 3 Math sessions

• 4th grade - 4 ELA sessions and 3 Math sessions

• 5th grade - 3 ELA sessions, 3 Math sessions, and 2 Science sessions

We plan on knocking out the MAP in about two weeks from April 9-24.  We can always make up absences, but do try to get your student(s) to school every day so they don't miss a test!

(The picture above is from our Pi Day bead bracelet activity!)

Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd Grade: App exploration! They will practice using apps like Pages, Keynote, and GarageBand, then at the end of the month they will get to choose their favorite of the apps they learned this year to make a final project of their favorite creations for their Google Drive. 

3rd Grade: Using the Code.org Music Lab to add to their guitar and soundwaves project.

4th Grade: Using Canva to design posters for their Hip Hop studies project. 

5th Grade: Using Scratch to code their game project.