Tuesday, March 9, 2010

General Announcements:

• Parents! You can pick up your Prism's progress report in the main office! Also, conference slots still available for this Fri., 3/12 if you haven't signed up yet - Sign-up sheets in Prisms' main classroom entryway.
• You must have an independent reading book every day. If you are getting close to the end of one, have the next one at school and ready to go.

Math:

• 7th Grade:
  • Due Wed., 3/10: Complete #20-22 on p. 66. Also, you must bring a working protractor and compass to class on Thursday.
• 8th Grade:
  • Due Wed., 3/10: Read #20 on p. 37-38. Complete parts a,b,c of #20. Use grid paper and ruler for table. Also, do #21-26. answer questions as usual. You will need grid paper and dot paper.

Social Studies:

• Due Thurs., 3/11:
  • Organize your Ancient Rome folders per same criteria as Space Science folders
  • Write a summary
  • Get a parent's signature.

Science:

• Test Thurs., 3/11: Read over your notes, especially pre-assessment. Come up with a list of topics you want to review for test.

Language Arts:

• Due Wed., 3/10: Finish reading Ch. 2 of The Children of Willesden Lane. You will be given an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the chapter in class.

Buddies:

• Due Thurs., 3/11: For Group going to Greens for Buddy Time: Bring a children's book to share with Greens.

Spanish:

• 7th Grade:

• 8th Grade:

Moment of Zen:

Darwin meets Dodgson in the Parlour

In the Victorian Era, cartes de visite (lit. "visiting cards" - think of them like baseball cards for tea drinking) were quite the thing. Ladies would display them, showing off all the guests they'd had at their house. Then, they started cutting up their friends' pictures and pasting them into strange contexts, onto the bodies of animals or into the middle of some kind of geometric maze, decades before surrealism and photomontage had been officially discovered. It's not entirely clear what started this fashion. Likely, it was a combination of things. One speculation is that as cartes de visite became more widely available to people outside the upper class, rich ladies felt the need to distinguish theirs further. Another deals with two books that came out within a few years of each other and which have both had a profound influence on the intellectual landscape. One was Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and the other was Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Both caused quite a stir, in very different ways, but both changed the image of what creatures could look like. Follow the link above to see a gallery of more odd and interesting visiting card collages, along with more history and interpretation to go with it.