Morah Nellie & Moreh Brett

Transcription

1 Dear parents, In honor of ל ג בעומר we learned about Rabbi Akiva and Bar Kochba. We emphasized Rabbi Akiva s desire to learn at an old age, and his well known teaching לרעך כמוך.ןאהבת We made a beautiful poster with a heart in the center. The לב was constructed using cutout of little hands colored in rainbow colors (we evoked קשת בענןthe from the Noah story) to emphasize the concept of אהבה and.שלום We talked about Bar Kochba, the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans, using bone fires, מדורות to send messages to far away towns. The children collected small dried tree branches to make pictures of.מדורות Dipping their hands in paint was fun and according to some children was squishy. When learning parashot בהר וחוקותי we discussed the concepts of שנת שמיטה and יובל.שנת In people free the slave and יובל farmers cease from work and allow the land to rest and in שמיטה allow them to go home. Many children were able to make a connection to Pesach and the some remembered that we were once slaves to Pharaoh in.מצרים Others disagreed, I was not there, our ancestors were. In these lively and precious conversations children share their own understanding of abstract concepts while also challenging their classmates. The children s concept of time has been developing since the beginning of the year. They consult our classroom clock often to determine when is playtime, or.חטיף We often explain to them how an analog clock works and many are becoming more adept at telling time. In the past few days, since Julius went to Israel the children have wanted to know the time in Israel. THey find it amusing that when we start our morning routines, it is afternoon for Julius. We continued our Jerusalem unit and this week we talked about טחנת הקמח in ימין משה which was built by מונטיפיורי.משה It was particularly relevant, since we spent a great deal of time discussing wheat and experimenting with two methods of grinding it when we talked about the Omer. The children were surprised to learn that s מונטיפיורי mill never worked, but the building remained a monument.

2 In General Studies we continued to work with the letter "e." We practiced writing it in both upper and lower case forms. We also spent more time searching, identifying, and reading the sight words "here," "go," and "from" in "I Spy" practice worksheets. The big question of the week was: "What kind of adventures can you have in the city?" This generated an interesting discussion in which the students mentioned seeing skyscrapers, visiting parks, seeing crowds of people, going to shows/plays, etc. As a whole class we read the book Abuela. The book is about a young girl named Rosalba who takes a trip through her imagination with her abuela (grandmother). They fly over Manhattan Island and observe the many extraordinary sites that the city has to offer. Key vocabulary words within the story were: abuela, flock, airport, adventure, city, and harbor. We talked about who the characters are in the story and the students remembered from last week that they can be real or imaginary. We also revisited the meaning of the term "setting" (where and when a story takes place) and discussed what the setting was in Abuela. The students astutely pointed out that the setting took place in Rosalba's mind during a visit to the city in the daytime. We plan on going over the term "pronoun" and working on examples of pronouns in sentences by the end of the week. In small group study we read a short book entitled Ted and the Pet. We first read the book together. Then the students took turns decoding and reading each of the pages in the book. The students were then tasked with blending and spelling out various three and four letter words that have the short /e/, /a/, or /i/ sound in the middle of them. We plan on finishing the week by drawing a picture of a favorite adventure and writing a sentence or two describing where and/or when that adventure would take place. In Math the students continued to work on solving subtraction words problems. This time they were given blank worksheet pages, were read multiple word problems and were required to convert the problems into pictures and then ultimately into number sentences. Students that grasped the concepts quickly and finished early moved on to work on additional subtraction worksheets. A few students even advanced on to work on Sudoku number puzzles! In Science (as previously mentioned in Nitzachon) we followed up on our experience in making homemade popsicles with a discussion on the three states of matter (gases, liquids, and solids). The students learned that water freezes at 32 degrees fahrenheit, that it boils at 212 degrees fahrenheit, and that we had to cool our juice down to at least 32 degrees in order for our popsicle experiment to work properly. Morah Nellie & Moreh Brett

3 Shabbat Shalom, Nellie and Brett

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