Guitar club

Hello,

We'll be starting up our guitar club tomorrow (Tuesday). We'll meet every Tuesday after school. Mr. Larrabee, Mrs. Palopoli, and possibly Mrs. Wilson (3rd grade) will be involved as well. None of us are guitar players and at least one of us has no musical talent to speak of. We will learn along with our students.

Not all the other teachers and students can make it tomorrow, so we'll have an informal first session. We have some guitars being loaned to us, so not everyone will need their own guitar to take part. Once we get a few weeks in, I would think at home practice will become more and more necessary to keep up with, well, me anyway. (Read that last part sarcastically) Dube's Music in Freeport is offering 3/4 sized guitars at a very reasonable 90 dollars for any students joining our program. I know that isn't chump change, but in comparison to some other instruments, I think that is a pretty good deal. At the very least, I'm sure you could get a lot of your money back if one day you had to sell it used.

Today we took our first spelling test of the year. We'll be working with the Words Your Way program.

We also had a bit of introduction to our explorers unit. I'm just giving them a heads up on the fact that each student will be focusing on an individual explorer. They can choose their explorer on a first come, first serve basis. Each student will be making up explorer cards in the computer lab. The idea is that, by the end of the unit, everyone will have a collection of 24 explorer cards. The card design will be much like baseball cards: picture and basics on front, important stats and interesting information on the back. No gum.

I'd like to give a plug to card and/or dice games. Watching many students struggle with basic addition, makes me think back to the ways that I learned to add quickly. Any games that require multiple dice, like Monopoly or Yahtzee are great for adding. 99 and cribbage were also major contributors to my heralded speed test career as a child. So there's my homework recommendation: play some games!

Have a great night.

Mr. Shea