As the week comes to an end, I wanted to get some news out to you.

First of all, the students did such a great job on the field trip today! These trips are such important experiences for the students and also a lot of fun! The students were so well behaved and I know Mrs. Willms would want me to pass on her thanks to the students for the wonderful way they represented Highroad Academy!

Oct 25  – Pumpkin Math Day: On Tuesday, Oct. 25, we are going to be doing our annual Pumpkin Math day with Mrs. Goosen’s class. We have been doing this for many years now and is one of our favourite fall activities! We are going to get messy with pumpkins while learning lots of math. This is a great way to get involved with our class! We would love to have you come out and join us. If you are interested in helping out with Pumpkin math day, please let me know. We’d love to have to come and get messy with us! 🙂 Pumpkin math usually is a half day starting at around 9:30.

Oct. 26 – Wednesday, we are having our Fall Colour Day. Students can come to school wearing casual pants and shirts with the glorious colours of fall on them. These can include red, brown, orange, green, yellow, gold, etc.

Memory Verse: Our memory verse for the week is Matthew 6:11-12. This will be due on Monday. Don’t forget that to get an “extending”, students need to not only recite the verse to me but also need to tell me how this verse applies to them. Students can use any version they want. The verse is,

Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Music of the Week:
This week, we are listening to Hilary Hahn. She is an amazing violinist who has played at concerts all over the world. She also plays on one of my favorite soundtracks. A number of years ago, my wife bought me tickets to go and see in her Bellingham and, while we were there, we got to meet with her and talk to her. We also got to see her talk about her playing and her approach to music when we saw her in Austria during our world tour. One of my favourite performances is her work on the soundtrack for the movie “The Village” which came out many years ago. The movie itself is sort of a quasi-suspense movie but the main thing that has always attracted me to the movie was Ms. Hahn’s playing of the music. The music always reminds me of fall with feelings of wistfulness and things ending flowing through the sounds.

It was a fantastic experience and the music was beautiful. She has played since she was a young girl and has devoted herself to mastering the violin though she was still able to get her Master’s in University before the age of 18.

On completely different topic…..

Here is a really neat infographic showing 3 different ways to breathe. The picture illustrates how a human, a bird and a grasshopper all breathe in different ways. Seems particularly relevant with the type of air quality we are experiencing right now.

Finally…
I found this cool series of videos talking about the constellations you can see in the night sky right now.