Song of Witches by William Shakespeare

Song of the Witches

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

FROM "MACBETH", Act IV, Scene I

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the caldron boil and bake;

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,

Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon's blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

What's Cooking . . .

Students in grades 6, 7, & 8 are working collaboratively on creating a class cookbook during their computer enrichment classes. This project will incorporate many areas of the curriculum such as technology, art, music, math, language arts, and physical education.

Students will use PowerPoint to format their project. Additional technology will allow the students to photograph their recipes at home and e-mail them to me at mwood@lowell.k12.ma.us. We will also practice manipulating the photographs in iPhoto. I have camera’s available to loan to students!

Since this is a collaborative project, students will design cookbook covers in art, the winning covers will be the front and back of their cookbook. All other artwork will be inserted and incorporated into the cookbook. To accomplish this, students will scan their art into a file.

Students will select music from my library or bring in their own appropriate “G” rated music and incorporate it into their PowerPoint.

The math activity will require students to calculate the fat, calories, carbohydrates and serving sizes of their recipes.

The language arts activity will require the students to write a brief description of why they selected that particular recipe, or if it’s a family favorite, write about the history behind the recipe.

Finally, students will select a physical activity and describe how long they would have to workout to burn the calories for that recipe.

Bon Appetite! 

This Week in History

This Week in History

Oct 04, 1957       Sputnik launched

The Soviet Union inaugurates the "Space Age" with its launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite," was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik's orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.

Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets' new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the "space race."

The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late '60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969.

Students:  Ask your parents and grandparents what they know about Sputnik!