Weekly Update

Dear Families,

We are excited that the month of Adar and the holiday of Purim are coming! In Jewish Studies last week, the students learned about opposites (ונהפוך הוא). For example, yes and no (כן ולא), light and darkness (אור וחושך), day and night (יום ולילה), big and small (גדול וקטן), laughing and crying (צוחק בוכה), etc. The students were asked to create their own lists of opposites. Here they are presenting those lists:

In Torah, we learned how God created the human being. The kids were very curious, and asked good questions about Creation! In Tefillah, we finished studying the Ashrei prayer. Please have your child continue to practice it at home. In the book My Weekly Sidrah, please remember to ask your child to share information about the weekly Parasha, and then sign the book each Sunday. Toda!

Math Blogger (Lial) – “In Math, we weighed 1 kg and found out that a chair is about 3 kg, 4 100-cubes (Base-10 flats), and a hole punch! We are learning about grams, which are smaller than kilograms. We are learning about pounds and ounces. Here are their abbreviations: pound = lb, ounce = oz. When we are older and go to the grocery store to weigh something we want to buy, we will see how much we need to pay for it.”

Here we are in action!

In this next activity, we attempted to create equal weight on both sides of this balance. It reinforced that grams are very small and very lightweight. It also took a lot of estimation and a lot of patience!

After weighing many objects around the classroom, the kids finally convinced me to weigh Scooby Doo! Lial remembered that Scooby weighed over 1 kilogram!

Spelling Blogger (Benjamin H.) – Today is Monday and we just took our Pretest. Everyone probably did very good. My favorite words from the Green List were: about, ground, and around. We found a lot of words around the room!

Science Blogger (Jake L.) – “We finished our unit on plants. The next unit is frogs. I wonder what’s going to happen to the plants in our room. Since we are studying frogs, we got cards to write down what type of frog we want to study.”

I found it very interesting that Jake considered the work we have already done on frogs as Science material. I had put it into the Reading category, but he is right too! As I tell the students all the time, subjects integrate with one another. In this unit on frogs, we have read several stories, and learned about the differences between a frog and a toad. We’ve also examined the life cycle of a frog, from egg (a large group of them are called frog spawn), to tadpole, to froglet, to frog! At times, we worked as a whole class, and at other times, in small Reading groups. We are about to begin a report on specific types of frogs. All work will be done in class, and we look forward to showing you our research and creations. I am so happy that the students are so motivated to learn!

In Wordly Wise, we used a website called Quizlet, which the kids have used many times in Jewish Studies, to review our four previous lessons. Everyone had several turns to participate, and it was their choice to use either the laptop or the SmartBoard to enter their answers.