6th Grade First Weeks! 10/7/22

Humanities:

These past few weeks in ELA, we’ve read lots of fun and surprising stories about several of the Olympian Greek gods, including Zeus, Hera, Athena, and more. While reading, we are beginning to look more deeply into the text and practice drawing conclusions about characters based on textual evidence. In addition, we took a step back to consider how a culture’s particular mythology informs its values and belief systems, and how these stories answer “BIG questions” like: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What is our purpose on earth? For example, we learned about how origin myths — or stories about how the world was created — have helped humans around the world address and find meaningful answers to those very questions for generations. In pairs, we examined some of these origin myths from different cultures, including stories from the Chinese, Iroquois, Maya, Zulu, and Efik people. Then, students presented the myths they read through art, drama, or digital presentations. Throughout our discussion and exploration of this topic, we also recapped the Jewish interpretation of how the world began and made time to review the Big Bang Theory, too. Our retellings of creation stories from around the world provided students with new insight into diverse religions, mythologies, and belief systems. I encourage you to ask your child to share which origin story they read and where it’s from!

Shabbat shalom,

Naomi

Math: 

It has been a busy and engaging month! In Topic A, students started off the year being introduced to ratios. In the elementary grades, students learned to recognize number patterns, make equal groups, write multiplicative comparisons, and work with fractions. They are now applying these skills in 6th grade as they recognize part-to-part and part-to-whole relationships, write ratios, and explain the meaning of ratios. They are using precise ratio notation and ratio language to describe situations represented pictorially and verbally. As students work with real world scenarios, they are using a variety of tools to explore the addition and multiplication patterns that exist in all ratio relationships; This will lay a foundation for comparing ratio relationships in the next topic. After they develop fluency with representing ratio relationships in multiple ways, they will examine the patterns in these relationships in tables and graphs. Using repeated addition to create equivalent ratios from pairs of numbers in ratio tables and progressing to multiplicative relationships, students will create sets of equivalent ratios. Last, they will write equivalent ratios and use these ratios to solve problems. The 6th graders also completed their first mini math project, “Mission to Mars”, where they used ratio reasoning to convert measurement units as they researched, planned, and analyzed a mission to Mars. 

Katie

Judaic Studies: 

Music: 

Hebrew: 

In Hebrew, the 6th graders learn about there immediate environment and how to describe it. We learn to recognize infinitives and verbs in the right manner. We use אפשר and אי אפשר, and מותר and אסור to help us create richer and more complete sentences.  The students learn new vocabulary that lets them expand their thoughts. Using many of these help the students write and converse short paragraphs and short conversations

Tomer

Hebrew Heritage: 

General 6th grade: 

The 6th graders had a great time getting to know our second grade buddies today with some ice breakers and Sukkot-related activities. For some pairs of buddies, this was a reunion since last year, and other buddy pairs were meeting for the first time. In the photos for this week’s blog you will see some photos with our buddies! Ask your 6th grader about their 2nd grade buddy and what they chatted about.