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3rd Blog – 12/2

Lenape, Lenape, Lenape!  We have been engrossed in our research on one aspect of Lenape culture. Though learning never ends, we had to end our research after looking at various sources from books and articles to videos online. Once compiled, we realized we had a lot of information. The next step was to organize our information. 

We cut out each fact and sorted them into categories and then put them in an order that made sense. Then it was time for writing.

Looking at our notes, we found a way to make a paragraph that made sense, rather than just listing facts. We also wrote in our own words to make sure we weren’t copying someone else’s idea. 

After our final drafts, we were finally ready to compile our books. Using construction paper, we planned and laid out our pages, using our writing and pictures we printed or drew.

We hope you will join us on Wednesday, December 7, at 9:00am so we can share our books! 

 

In reading, students have been working on jotting after their reading. This means they write a brief summary of what they read and add their thoughts. This skill encourages students to stop and react to what they are reading. Is this part funny? Is there a connection I can make? A prediction? What am I wondering about this story? 

 

Art

3rd graders have extended their study of the Lenape to art class. We’ve been studying artifacts from the Smithsonian collections database, and using what we have learned to make replicas or interpretations of the artifacts. Our topics and sculptures range from Spirits and Medicine to Fashion, Roles in Society, Farming and Fishing, and more. We can’t wait to show off our sculptures and books at the publishing party!

 

Music

In Music class, Third Graders have been perfecting the tuning process. They have been reading, singing and playing the open string pitches. This week, they are making up, playing, singing, memorizing and sharing their own original melodies created using the open string pitches.

 

Hebrew with Rimma

3rd grade is working on the unit “Clothes”. Students are  practicing new vocabulary related to clothing: what they wear in cold/hot weather, to school or during leisure time, to the gym etc. We regularly recap and reinforce previously learned structures, agreements between nouns and adjectives, nouns and verbs in gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural).

In writing students recombined learned vocabulary creatively into a short paragraph describing what somebody’s wearing in what color and what kind of accessories they wear. 

We have been hard at work writing and drawing to our publishing party and we are even more excited about our fashion show. 

From time to time, 3rd graders do yoga in Hebrew as well.

Judaics with Shira

Third graders have been learning about the weekly parsha through reading parsha magazines published by Hadar Institute. The magazines are full of anecdotes, summaries, cartoons, questions, and debate topics. For parashat Chayei Sarah we read that Eliezer decided that Rivkah was a suitable match for Yitzchak after seeing how she offered water to him and his camels. Third graders then held a debate along the question, are first impressions the most important thing. They had interesting arguments around whether you can tell if someone will be a good friend when you first meet them. It was great to see how eager each of the students was to get up and debate each other in front of the class. Every student took home a magazine today for Parashat Vayetze, so make sure to check your child’s backpack.

To read more about these magazines, look here:

https://www.hadar.org/hadar-launches-devash-weekly-parashah-magazine-children-families

 

We have also continued to study Parashat Lech Lecha in Chumash class. This past week we learned how to identify a male, female, and plural verb. Students learned that verbs in the torah are structured differently than in modern Hebrew, and they must look at both prefixes and suffixes of a word to know who the subject is. We also started to learn how to identify the shoresh, root, of a word.  We saw that while there are rules in grammar, there are also many exceptions to the rule that make our jobs a bit more tricky, but also interesting, for instance, when not all 3 of the root letters appear in a word.