Tilting the Axis of the World

Here's everything you'll need to know this week:

• We are going to be working on the Veteran's Day Program for Woodbrook. This one is going to be a little different than it was in the past, with fourth grade doing the songs and us doing the lines. I have a list of willing kids to do the spoken lines, and I will be meeting with Mrs. Ratner this week to nail down the song list and compare notes. It really crept up on me. The program will be on the morning of November 9. We will also be writing invitations this week to the veterans of the area.
• I will be gone on Monday afternoon. I have a doctor's appointment, so I'll be leaving at 11 tomorrow morning. 
• It seems now that the problems with the email and computer networking in Carmel Clay are now over, at least for the meantime.
• A big shout out to Miss Lauren Pitz, whose team won semi-state yesterday in Huntington, and who goes to the state volleyball championships for the ISHAA. Congratulations, Miss Lauren! 
• This Friday, we will be having another one of those Theme Tests that everyone loves so much, as well as a Spelling Test. We will be having a Math Exam on Wednesday. Tomorrow the students will receive both a spelling list and a study guide for the Math test. 
• A recent Math lesson, ironically enough, alerted Miss Hume and me to the fact that students don't know where key cities in the United States are located. Cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, and even Chicago seem to be missing geographically in the kids' minds. This was the first year we hadn't done the States and Capitals lessons at the beginning of the year, so guess what we're going to be doing starting this week? I'll get with Mrs. Jackson (the bearer of the materials for this) and get the kids' first region to them, probably on Thursday or so. We'll be having a quiz on this next week, and every week thereafter until we're done with the whole U.S.of A. We believe that it is important for the boys and girls to know these things even if only for the sake of cultural literacy.
• We watched the Nova episode called "To the Moon" last week in Science. The kids were really interested in this, and it really did tell a more human side than, in my opinion, even The Right Stuff. They interviewed the astronauts and NASA officials throughout the episode. This week, we will be tracking the path of the sun, and the students will find that the astronomy unit will really run throughout the rest of the school year. We're also going to be discussing some more of the early astronomers from all over the world: Nicholas Copernicus, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Caliph Harun al Rashid. Then it's back to Social Studies for awhile while we wait for our next Science unit to begin.
• Poetry will be on the docket for this week. The kids will be asked to write poems, some of them probably tying in with the Veteran's Day Program. Also in Language Arts, we'll continue talking about possessive nouns and possessive pronouns, synonyms and antonyms, and we are focusing on monitoring our understanding while we're reading. 
• And a special thank you goes out to Luke B., who made a new video on YouTube with the lyrics to "Don't Look Back in Anger," the song our class sings last thing each Friday afternoon. Well done, Luke! That took some time and effort--very much appreciated. Plus, I love the fact that he did not put a thousand exclamation points during the guitar solo. Too many exclamation points are my grammatical bane of existence.