Students took a quick stems review quiz today. It was just to get them back in the habit of thinking about stems and applying what they know. Yesterday in Spanish, a few made the connection between the Spanish word for “before” and their knowledge of the stem for before.

Today was one of my favorite days in the poetry unit. Students were given a piece of white construction paper and asked to fold it in half. I played them four musical selections, though I used YouTube – they could not see the video. Their job was to draw a picture based on what they were hearing in each of the four sections of their paper. There were no other rules or explanations.  I’ve posted links to the YouTube videos below. There was some grumbling during Vivaldi. One student was unhappy that, in the middle of her happy picture, the tone of the music changed and “ruined” her whole picture. They’ll eventually be writing poetry based on their pictures. I’ll also use this lesson to reinforce the idea of word choice – how are music and writing related? How does using specific vocabulary create tone in the same way a composer creates tone using musical instruments?