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Coman Hill Students Get Physical

Coman Hill students spent two weeks enjoying Fitness Monopoly in their physical education classes earlier this school year, where they participated in 30 different stations incorporating strength, endurance, balance, and agility.

Interdisciplinary skills such as math and reading are used and the students also strengthen their social skills in working with partners.

"The students look forward to this every year," says physical education teacher Jessica Woolf.

A toss of oversized die and a math calculation determined which station students would visit. "I liked spinning plates best," said Liam Bruskewicz.

With station names like spining spinach and stretching strawberry, Fitness Monopoly includes a nutrition element highlighting fruits and vegetables, and one station requires students to sort models of food into nutrition categories.

Coman Hill second graders try stilts during a physical education unit called Fitness Monopoly.

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Finding Harmony at Wampus

Who knew that a seemingly simple instrument like the xylophone could offer such rich music lessons exploring pitch, patterns, melody, texture and harmony? Probably Wampus fifth graders, who spent a unit in the fall discovering all that glockenspiels, wooden xylophones and metalophones have to offer.

"Xylophones are a tremendously helpful tool for music because they help make pitch and melody tangible for the students," says Wampus music teacher Emily Traycheff. "They allow students to experience pitch in a concrete way and to make auditory and visual connections between pitch relationships." 

Ms. Traycheff says that upcoming lessons will include transposing pieces of music from C, the key in which her students have been working, to other keys. "Students will have to learn to manipulate some of the bars of the instrument to play different scales; this is a very clear way to experience what happens when there is a change of key." 

In the future, they will progress from playing everything in unison and begin to play orchestrations for songs.  "This will be good reinforcement of the skills they are learning in their chorus, orchestra, or band ensembles," Ms. Traycheff says.  

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High School Students Read!