Winter Holidays

Just a little post to say that I hope you and your family are having as much relaxation and mutual enjoyment of one another as the Merricks are. We are enjoying the unstructured days and also looking forward to the structure that school gives to our days. Colin turns 10 on the first day back to school, so Ms. Lamitina's class can look forward to some tasty homemade cupcakes, his snack of choice for the event.

There are many things in the works for the winter computer lab:

Fourth grade continues space exploration and will meet twice for Interactive VideoConferences on that topic, once with NASA and once with former NASA astronaut Dr. Rick Chappell of Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory, to learn from the experts about the challenges of living in space. We'll be continuing with our PowerPoint work, turning earlier research on constellations into one monster, whopping PowerPoint slideshow reporting the results of that research.

Third grade will be writing poetry with Word, beginning to research Master Artists on the 'Net, and finding that there are some really fun Geometry activities on the Internet as well. In the Master Artist study we'll watch some great films from unitedstreaming.com, a service that we as school are taking around the proverbial block for the year to gauge its usefulness.

Second graders will be exploring some Internet sites of their own to help them in their studies of how we tell and express time, and they'll also find some great practice sites to help with multi-digit addition and subtraction. Since they're studying Caldecott books we'll see some author and illustrator sites that will help them understand and appreciate children's literature the highest caliber.

First graders are continuing their weather work and we'll be looking at some unitedstreaming resources for them, too. We'll also see what's out there in the way of number story resources to help them in their mathmatical endeavors and explorations.

Finally, and firstly, our Kindergarteners will be exercising their Drawing for Children muscles by creating some drawings to send to Boowa and Kwala at uptoten.com. In the past, the site's creator has put up whole galleries of our work, and I'm suspecting that he'll accomodate us similarly again, especially if our students' work is as good as I know it can be.

That's it from the Merrick house over the holidays. I've been very busy working on a new podcast to help folks with computer maintenance. It's TechTipTuesday, and I'm putting a great deal of effort into making it both fun and helpful click it's title to visit the blog that hosts it and let me know what you think! Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeers, and Happy New Year!!!