Benton Specialist Monthly Recap

In the art room, our younger students have just completed a fun and engaging robot unit that reviewed the fundamentals of line, shape, and color. We also took time to revisit our classroom expectations and routines to ensure a positive and productive start to the new year. Next, we’ll be exploring the concept of space in visual art by creating landscapes using various media to develop a sense of depth in our artwork.

Meanwhile, our older students are diving into the fascinating intersection of geometry and visual art by creating optical illusions in a style known as Op Art. This unit encourages creativity and critical thinking as students use a design process to plan, practice, and refine their work. I’m thrilled with the growth I’ve seen so far this school year and can’t wait to see how students combine these skills to create their best artwork yet!

Students in all grades worked on basketball dribbling skills.  Students tried to dribble with fingertip and keeping control of the ball. 

Even Kindergartners showed great improvement.

5th Grade has started the new year learning ukulele!  We’ve learned two basic chords, and many songs we can play with those two chords.

4th Grade continues playing their way through recorder.  We’ve mastered B, A, and G, and are now adding new notes like E to our repertoire.

3rd Grade spent January learning about sixteenth notes, and identifying different tempos in music

2nd Grade continued exploring the half note in January, with lots of different songs and games!

1st Grade has been exploring instruments of the orchestra through the story of Peter and the Wolf, as well as learning songs and games using the pitches, Sol, Mi and Do

Kindergarten continues to work on exploring steady beat, and using our four voices (speaking, singing, shouting, and whispering) in different activities.

January has been a month of remembering school routines and getting back into learning. In Counseling, students have focused on identifying their interests and talents, which links them to possible career choices when they enter the working world. Through class discussions, students learn why people work, discovering that it takes money to buy food, shelter, and other basics.

Most students from K-5 can name the 6 Career Paths and jobs that go with them. By playing games like Career Headbands, Career Tic-Tac-Toes, and Career Bingo, students learn about jobs, while also having a lot of fun!

Brr!  K-2 brought all the snow into the makerspace this month.  The goal was to design a snow plow by attaching Legos to an iPad-controlled robot.  The plows worked great!  We need to employ these little engineers!

We are also completing our school One Read this month, which is The Banana-Leaf Ball, by Katie Smith Milway.  It's the story of child refugees in Tanzania who create a new sense of identity and community around their love of soccer.  We will Zoom with the author and have a guest speaker from City of Refuge.  Every class also received a real banana-leaf ball to play with.  The goal with this One Read is to build our own community, exercise empathy, broaden our global awareness in general, and find small tangible ways that we can help.  If you would like to donate to our local refugee outreach, City of Refuge, you could purchase something from their basic needs list on Amazon.

As always, please fill out this form if you'd like to share something unique about your student on our hallway projector screen! 

In Media, all grades are learning how to search databases and collect information. We are currently using the databases PebbleGo, BrainPop, and World Book Kids. 

Here’s are 3 fun facts from the BrainPop & PebbleGo databases.

1. Axolotls are only found in freshwater around Mexico City.

2. Mae Jemison was the first African American women to go to space.

3. The state mineral for Missouri is Galena.