Gushing, Tweaking, and Mandolin-ing

This post is from our mandolin-strumming Marine Madesclaire. She wrote this on Friday at the conclusion of a three-day residency at Benton Heights Elementary School of the Arts.

It's now the final day of our first residency here at Benton Heights Elementary School of the Arts, and I'm gonna miss these kids. Our third graders have the most amazing teacher who participates in every exercise and even jumped up to google images on his smart board while we were talking about caves, canyons and island. Amazing! Even better the 4th and 5th graders are so far ahead of us that they taught me the curriculum! I have to stop gushing... It's embarrassing. :)

Getting the show on the road and claiming it as our own has been an interesting experience. I actually got very sick our first day there, powering through the first day of classes thanks to the children's enthusiasm. My teaching partner Miss Marissa and I got into a wonderful rhythm by the second day tweaking our class curriculum to fit the classes. We even figured out a jig to play the kiddos with the mandolin and the penny whistle.

With these three days done and over I'm excited to see what come up on our next residency.

Fun Times at Benton Heights

This post is from the lovely dancing robot-lady, Julianne Harper.



So...we just finished up our wonderful first week at Benton Heights Elementary! Ian & I are working with Ms. Norman's fourth grade class, Ms. Lewis' fifth grade class, Ms. Foster's fourth grade class, and I worked with Peter and Brandon in Ms. Hoover's third grade class. I want to take a moment to give all of our students a HUGE round of applause! (clap,clap,clap,clap,clap,CLAP:0)
The week was so much fun because of our students; they are all so creative, well mannered, bright, and enthusiastic. Not only did they already have a fairly comprehensive grasp on the curriculum we were covering, but every second of class time was filled with creative investigation. As as result, so many discoveries were made as well as deeper understandings of subjects that the students were not as familiar with. And bottom line...we had a lot of FUN!
Our third grade classes were able to share with each other what they had been working on during the week. We all gathered into the school's auditorium, and the kids were able to see what performing on a real stage is like. Ms. Hoover's class presented commercials that they had made up from scratch to sell soil, and let me tell you-I was ready to buy some soil!
I look forward to this week continuing with our fourth and fifth grade classes because they will have a chance to perform for each other just like the third grade. I can't wait to see what surprises each class has in store!