Santiago Del CurtoJack BeLmonte

First Grade, Clarinet

UPBEATSpecial Music School PTA monthly Newsletter

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We welcome Officer Hoques grandson

Congratulations

Winner of the Middle School Advisory Snow Man Design Contest

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Dear families,

Congratulations to the staff and students of SMS for our K-8 MLK celebration. Each class worked hard to present art, speeches and poems that helped us remember work of MLK, and to remember the civil rights issues he fought for years ago are still relevant today. When I asked some of the elementary students about highlights of the Town Meeting presentation they noted the Middle School’s recitation of the “I’m so glad you didn’t sneeze” excerpt of the the Mountaintop speech by Dr. King and the fourth grade poem Standing Tall by Jamie McKenzie. Congratulations to everyone.

This month the elementary school read Back of the Bus, by Aaron Reynolds. This is a beautiful book that tells the story of Rosa Parks through the eyes of a child. Our discussions began by studying the way Rosa was portrayed on the bus. (I’ve attached Leah Amory’s likeness of Rosa Parks from the book.) The first observations our elementary students had about the illustrations of Rosa were “mean” and “unfriendly.” As we spoke more about the context and climate of the times the students changed their impressions to “pride” “courage” and “strength.”

Additionally, you may remember our previous read aloud Little Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton

(creator of Humans of New York.) If you have time, please read some of the stories of Ms. Lopez and Mott Hall Bridges Academy on the Humans of New York site. I find them incredibly inspiring and also a wonderful conversation piece about “empathy” with students. You can find those stories here: http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/24/living/feat-humans-of-new-york-harvard-fundraiser/

February is a short month at school. Don’t forget to pick up a few good books for you and your child before break. Also, please join us for an afternoon of ice skating on the 25th!

Written by : Katie Banucci-Smith - Principal, The Specal Music School

Katie Banucci-Smith, Principal, The Special Music School

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January was our first real month of “winter”, and we tried to warm things up at SMS with chamber music. Students presented some of their chamber music work in performance classes on Monday, January 26, and Tuesday, February 3. Weekly chamber music helps students to develop their music reading skills—they can’t stop in the middle of a phrase if their ensemble players continue to play!—and it creates an awareness of musical communication between 2 or more performers. Of course, there is the obvious cuing and keeping rhythms and gestures together, but there are also more subtle aspects of music making that students begin to appreciate. For string players and singers, there is the constant question of whether to create a “blended sound” versus a more distinctive awareness of different instruments or separate vocal and musical lines.

For a pianist or guitarist playing with strings or winds, there is the beginning awareness of how to try to match the other instrument’s “color” and sound so that some of your playing sounds blended, or at least connected. For percussionists, there is the rather unforgiving aspect of “attack”—if the players are not exactly together when they strike their instruments, there is no way to finesse the beginning of a sound so that it sounds more synchronous. Dealing with these elements in early chamber music experiences paves the way for more sophisticated developments that dominate solo playing in more mature musicians: as a pianist, how can I imitate strings and winds to create a more obvious Baroque-style sound? As a string or wind player, I begin to understand that Haydn chose to make his sections and structures

very obvious to the listener, whereas Mozart would use different instruments to overlap musical “seams”; how can I apply that awareness to my concerti interpretations, or other pieces I play by those composers? (and look how Beethoven experiments with those concerns within movements and across entire works!). The skill sets are broad and far-reaching.Luke Schwartz and I took each of his classes for an ensemble sight reading day in mid-February. Pianists generally met in the piano lab, and instrumentalists stayed in the theory classroom. On their instruments, we sight read materials that were relevant to Luke’s classes, either in terms of the sight singing components, or in terms of the repertoire our students are analyzing this year. For example, grade 6 students sight read pieces with 4

distinct voices or

parts; grade 7 pianists learned the basics for realizing figured basslines. They seemed to have fun and we will try to incorporate these skill-building days about once per month. The ability to sight read through repertoire with friends allows for a great deal of independent exploration of repertoire. And it’s fun! We will continue to look for more opportunities to build these skills and our students’ abilities to enjoy shared musical endeavors.

Keep warm!Sandra

Written by : Sandra Noreen - Dean of Music

Middle School Student Council Spirit Week Poster

Middle School Student Council has been very busy this winter. Student Council has taken on planning the activities for one Monday Advisory of each month. In December, Shai Rodriguez and Giorgio Poma led an electric game of Pictionary, which was followed by a thrilling trivia contest facilitated by Hannah Rudt and Myah Segura. The Student Council also kicked off their return from Winter Recess with an after-school trip to see Into The Woods. The film was voted for by the middle school students. This was followed by a fun Winter Spirit Week. The Student Council is currently planning a Valentine’s Day activity.

- Black History Month -Some suggested listening and reading to celebrate notable African-American composers and

performers. Go to the library or buy some CDs and enjoy!

Selected Amazing African-American Composers of Historical Note

William Grant Still (1895-1978)Oboist, composer and arrangerHighly Recommended Listening: Suite for Violin and Piano Afro-American Symphony

Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949)Professional singer and composer. He was influential in introducing spirituals to Dvorak when he visited America and worked as Dvorak’s assistant.Recommended Listening: Plantation Sketches (violin and piano)

Will Marion Cook (1869-1944)Composer and violinist, also a student of Dvorak Best known for his Broadway shows and popular songsRecommended listening: In Dahomey Overture

Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943)Famous for incorporating folksongs and spirituals within a Romantic sound.Recommended Listening: Cinnamon Grove (suite for piano)

Duke Ellington (1899-1974) all his music is amazing, and varied. Recommended Listening: Black, Brown and Beige Suite, ANY of his songs

Scott Joplin (1866-1917) all his rags are really fun to play and listen to. “The King of Ragtime”

Florence Price (1887-1953)She is recognized as the first African-American woman to have a composition played by a major orchestra (Chicago Symphony). Her varied output includes orchestral works, solo piano, brass band, vocal works as well as arrangements of spirituals.Highly Recommended: Symphony No. 3, Symphony in E Minor

Thelonoius Monk (1917-1982)Known for his unique improv style and jazz standards such as “Round Midnight” and “Blue Monk”.

Picture Books to Enjoy

When Marian Sang – Pam Munoz Ryan; a beautiful picture biography of Marian Anderson (and be sure to listen to some recordings of this incredible singer).

Ellington Was Not a Street – Ntozake Shange; picture book reflecting many of the greats (Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and more) of Shange’s childhood.

Charlie Parker played Be-Bop – Christopher Raschka; a fun tongue-twister picture book.

A Band of Angels: A Story Inspired by the Jubilee Singers – Deborah HopkinsonTells the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

Ella Fitzgerald: The Tale of a Vocal Virtuoso – Andrea Davis PinkneyGorgeous biography of the “first lady of song.”

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PoeTRYCelebration

April 2nd - 1:30 PMANN GOODMAN RECITAL HALL

Hope’ is the thing with feathers—That perches in the soul—And sings the tune without the words—And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—And sore must be the storm—That could abash the little BirdThat kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—And on the strangest Sea—Yet, never, in Extremity,It asked a crumb—of Me.

-Emily Dickinson (1830-1896)

To MusicMusic: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You heart-space grown out of us. The deepest space in us, which, rising above us, forces its way out,-- holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable.

Translated by Stephen MitchellRainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Grades 5-8 will present a poetry showcase:Choral settings of beloved poets, poetry readings and more

Parents and families are warmly invited. Check out the bulletin board on the 5th floor to see the poem of the week. Students are encouraged to compose a poem and submit it to be used in the celebration.

Poetry Submission: Each person may submit up to 3 entries. Submissions are due by Thursday March 12th.

Submissions can be handed to Emily John or placed in the envelope on the bulletin board across from room 521.We welcome submissions of any type (free verse, haiku, sonnet,) and we have a special category for limericks about SMS.

Poems can be silly, serious, musical, mechanical, wild or weird. All poems are welcome!

Here are two poems to get your poetic ideas flowing.

2nd grade works on their community posters

This last December, Isabella España, 3rd grade SMS student, participated in a Holiday Benefit Concert hosted by Church of the Advent Hope in New York City. Isabella performed Vivaldi’s Concerto in Am on violin and shared the stage with well known artists including blues performer SaRon Crenshaw and Cuban trio Yera Son. Over $12,000 was raised to support urgent health care amidst the Ebola crisis in Liberia. To learn more about the concert, please visit www.holidaybenefitconcert.org.

Ella Cohen (Grade 2) and Sophia Reyes (Grade 6) were first prize winners in their respective age categories in the Rondo Vanguard Competition and have been selected to perform in the winners concert at Weill Recital Hall in March.

Simon Hagopian-Rogers (5th grade) won first prize in the Carnegie Hall Vivo Competition in the Jr. Strings Division. At the winners concert, they announced a grand prize winner for all categories and age groups and Simon also won that. He played Carmen Fantasy by F. Drdla.

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Kaufman Music Center Fundraising Update

Thank you to parents who contributed to Kaufman Music Center so far this school year to help fund the music pro-gram at SMS. To-date, 41 SMS families have contributed a total of $57,507, meaning we are 26% towards the goal of $220,000.

A great way to contribute to SMS and help us reach our goals is by purchasing tickets to upcoming fundraising events this winter and spring. We still have tickets avail-able for the remaining Musical Evening: April 16 featuring violinist, Jennifer Koh and pianist Shai Wosner (1st grade parent). Tickets are $275 each. You can purchase tickets by phone at 212-501-3350, on the Kaufman Music Center website or in person by stopping by to see me on the 5th floor.

In addition, the 2015 Kaufman Music Center Gala is fast approaching. Be sure to mark May 19th on your calen-dars! This year we are excited to feature the talents of Tony award winning composer and lyricist, Jason Robert Brown! He is best known for his work on Broadway musi-cals Parade, The Last Five Years, The Bridges of Madison County, and Honeymoon in Vegas.Keep an eye out for letters seeking your early support, which will be sent this month! As in previous years, discounted tickets and ad rates will be available for SMS Parents.Thank you again and I hope to see you at some of the upcoming events!

Tiffini GambrellDevelopment Associatetgambrell@kaufmanmusiccenter.org

Happy February! I know I say this every month, but December and January were busy at the high school. Right before December break, students and teachers participated in our first annual SMS Hunt –a Learning Collectives Scavenger Hunt all over the Upper West Side.This was a fun and engaging community building experience where each collective was given three and a half hours, with their advisor, to “collect” items ranging from selfies with Alexander Hamilton on Columbia University’s campus to hanging with a living wall. As each challenge was completed, the collective took and posted a picture to Special Music School’s Instagram account. Students spent the day getting to know their fellow advisees and building their capacity to work as a team.

January marked our first week of midterms for the high school students. Midterms are aligned to course learning targets and demonstrate students’ learning over the semester. Mid-way through Regents week, students took a break for our monthly Cover Me competition, featuring covers of Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball (as selected by the students). Faith Smith (10), Adrianna Anzalone (10, Jackie Perez (10), Asila Folds (10), LaAsha Nelson (9) were named champs for their beautiful a cappella arrangement by

Asila Folds. The next Cover Me featuring Somebody to Love by Queen will take place on Thursday,

February 26th.

Students enjoyed a six day vacation during the last week in January due to Regents

Week. While it was also high school jury week, students enjoyed a much deserved

break, and they returned to school on February 3 to begin the Spring

Semester. Marking Period 3 is the shortest high school quarter,

ending March 23. This month’s Learning Collectives will launch a new HEART initiative and revisit

student goals set at November conferences.

Have you heard of MFKLCD? Ask your student about it--it is

a new faculty initiative to clarify student participation expectations.

Each day, students reflect and self-evaluate based on MFKLCD: Materials, Focus,

Kindness, Listening, Connection, and Discovery. At the end of the week, students turn in their daily reflections

and teachers use this to assess and support student learning. We hope that this will be a useful resource for conversations

between parents, students, and teachers.

Lastly, as part of our continuing efforts to support students, academic course

teachers will now be hosting office hours on the last Tuesday of every month from

2:45-3:45pm. Details and sign up will be sent around a week in advance. Have a wonderful

mid-winter recess!

Written by : Kristen Palmieri - High School

Written by : Seth Baer

J has been an exciting month at SMS High School! We have just successfully completed our first set

of Juries for the year and our students did extremely well. It was wonderful for me to sit in on many of them and hear all of the wonderful work that is being done in our private lessons.

Construction on our Practice Pods has officially begun! This development will truly enhance our school, providing additional ensemble and private practice room space for our students to use during the day and after school. The period of construction will be a bit challenging but this is an exciting development and we eagerly anticipate its completion.

Our current Core Ensemble rotation includes an interdisciplinary Tango Project which will feature the works of 4 student composers. They will be performed by an 8 member student ensemble, and will inspire the dancing and choreography of a professional tango dancer, Mayte Vicens culminating in a performances at the Players Theater on March 25 and in the MLK Auditorium on March 26. Finally, I am happy to announce that our student Vladimir Gessen was the winner of the 2015 High School Musician Concerto Competition for NYC’s Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corps Symphonic Band (LGBAC). He will be performing with the Band on April 11, 2015 in a concert at Symphony Space.

The second graders completed their social studies unit by creating a 3D model of urban, suburban and rural communities. We started these after visiting the panorama of NYC at the Queens Museum. We also wrote information books on this topic. Below, students use teamwork to label their community poster.

In January the seventh grade launched a special project to send books to those in need. Since September, the seventh grade has been writing to pen pals at the Spring Creek School on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota. After learning that our Lakota pen pals live in a very impoverished community, the seventh grade wanted to do some thing to support them. Each seventh grader brought in a gently used or new book to send to South Dakota. We sent each book with a recommendation by a seventh grader. Additionally, we held a bake sale initially intended to defray shipping costs. Our bake sale was so successful we were able to send the books we collected and twenty more! Thank you, SMS for your support of this wonderful effort!

The first graders celebrated their teamwork with a PJ party. They collected drops in a class bucket each time they showed HEART (for example: moving through halls/stairs quietly without reminders, working together to clean up a mess, everyone following directions the first time given. After months of working together to achieve this goal they partied!

Coming soon! February and it is HEALTY HEART Month!We can keep our Hearts Healthy with 7 Minutes of FUN starting Today!

PHYSICAL EDUCATION NEWSLETTER 2015

www.7-min.com It has a Timer, Pictures! Do it anytime, anyplace with your children or on your own!

Great for a homework break!

You’ll catch a cold by going outside without a jacket or hat!

Sorry, Mom and Dad, but not true. The only way to catch a cold is by picking up a virus. Being

cold will not give you a cold. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) acknowl-

edges that colds tend to be more common in the colder-weather

seasons, fall and winter, be-cause children are in school, indoors more, and in closer

contact with each other, mak-ing the virus more easily spread.

Kids get more colds than adults.This is true. According to the Mayo Clinic, children, es-pecially of preschool age can get up to six to ten colds annually, and some colds can linger for as long as two weeks. By contrast adults get two to four colds a year, on average, and the duration is shorter.

I feed a cold and starve a fever. (Or is it starve a cold and feed a fever?)Feed! Feed a cold, feed a fever, says the American Lung Association. Eating small, nutritious meals and snacks promotes heat, which helps produce proteins that fight virus reproduction. And to create that needed heat, the body needs calories to burn. Young and old should eat when they’re sick.

Special Events FREE Y-MVP Fitness Challenge for Middle School at the YMCAMiddle school experienced an introduction lesson, during P.E. class, to this 8 week Free Fitness Challenge. Some of our students have been through the program and enjoyed it so much, they did it a second time! Sim-ilar to the 7 minute workout, above but, It is uniquely designed for teens of ALL fitness levels, earn prizes for completing fitness missions and track your workouts with a very cool app. I sent students home with a reg-istration form. For More information visit Y-MVP: ym-canyc.org/ymvp

Olivia Pantoga and Daniel Mori plot their data on a double-y axis

SCIENCE 6 Students performing Predator-Prey Ecology Lab

Asher Kalfus, Graydon Hanson, Kyra Delacruz, Jonah Kernis measure how many mice are caught by a swooping owl

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KINDLES

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ONLINEAUCTION

the Auction HAs BEGUN!SMS

Don’t forget to bid!! Visit the SMS Auction today and EVERYDAY until 3/8/15 at 9:00 p.m.

For more information contact Jhoanna Robledo, email: Jhoanna@wadeonline.net

Happy Holidays, from the SMS PTA Fundraising Team5th Grade Class Parents

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Kaufman Music Center GalaTuesday, May 19th, 2015

The Edison Ballroom6:30 PM

Reception, Seated Dinner, Program and Live Auction Featuring an evening of music with Kaufman Center performing artists and students

For more information, Please call 212-501-3350 or visit KaufmanMusicCenter.org

This year we are excited to feature the talents of Tony award winning composer and lyricist, Jason Robert Brown! He is best known for his work on Broadway musicals Parade, The Last Five Years,

The Bridges of Madison County, and Honeymoon in Vegas.

Save the DateAUCTION Photo: Jason Robert Brown

Mensa Puzzle Calendar from Mr T.

Answers from last months puzzle from Mr. T

Starting hint: The only sets of three numbers from 1 to 10 that include 10 andadd to 16 are (1, 5, 10) and (2, 4, 10). Since the 4 is already used elsewhere, theside .with the 10 must be (1, 5, 10) in some order. Then, you can show that (3, 4,9) in some order is the only possibility for the numbers along the 4 side.

Following the logic used in the first three squares below, fill in the missing number in the fourth square.

Place the numbers 1 to 10, one per circle, so that each side of this pentagon totals 16. We’ve started you off with the 4 and 10. Can you finish the pentagon?

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4 7 8 5

21 35 99 ?2 1 7 2

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4