6th Grade News: 10/23-10/27/17
- Provide students with the tools to create a space between stimulus and response and manage high school process more effectively.
- Help students to distinguish between reality and their own thoughts and foster an ability to observe and label their own thoughts without judgment.
- Discover roots of mindfulness within Jewish Text and Values
- Cultivate caring community members
- Create a time and space of quiet reflection.
HEBREW
Dear parents,
This week students in HaKbatza Aleph continued to focus on the difference between life in the city and life in the country. Students in HaKbatza Beyt continued to practice describing what is and what is missing in different places.
In addition, this week, the middle school started a proficiency-based online assessment.
HUMANITIES
This week in Humanities classes, students worked on several projects and writing assignments. Now that they’ve finished the famous hero story The Epic of Gilgamesh, students are writing their own original stories that follow the “Hero’s Journey” pattern, or “monomyth” (a plot pattern that shapes many ancient and contemporary adventure stories). When they finish writing, they’ll transform their stories into digital presentations using the iPad app Adobe Spark Video. This morning, students had a great time exploring the app and thinking about how best to share their tales using voice recordings, digital imagery, and music.
In Writing class, students began learning about literary essays. Using the simple fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs” as our practice story, we learned how to craft and defend an argument about a character. We moved onto more complex stories after, as students collected textual evidence about Ishtar– a mythical goddess from their Gilgamesh books. Now, students are in the midst of writing argument paragraphs about this controversial character, and next week, we’ll write a longer essay.
Lastly, the 6th graders were excited to begin reading The Giver in Literature class. We’ve already begun holding deep discussions about the meaning of “utopia,” and I can’t wait to see how students’ thoughts evolve while we read.
Shabbat shalom,
Naomi
JUDAICS
Antonia
“This week we began our Sukkah project where we had to create Sukkahs at a smaller scale that are kosher and unique in some way. Some kids made a sukkah that seemed from first look that it wasn’t kosher. But halachically (according to Jewish Law) it had all the requirements. We looked in the mishnah and the more modern laws found in Shulchan Aruch. Other kids made digital Sukkahs on the chrome books. Some made sukkahs that had a specific meaning or lesson to teach people who saw it. Each group was given four days to create a model of a kosher sukkah based off of text we learned together. It was a really fun project and it was difficult at times, but overall it was really exciting and fun. Next week I look forward to presenting our sukkah to the class and explaining our building plan.”
Cy
“This week we planned out designs for making model sukkahs and then built them! We thought of our plans and then we used a document on google classroom where we had to answer questions about our design based on mishnah text that we had to translate. I learned so many different rules that the mishnah has about how to make a sukkah kosher and saw that there are many different opinions between Rabbis. I really liked building the models because projects where we build things are really fun!”
ART
Sixth grade students are working on sustainability and recycling posters that will be used around the school. As part of this assignment, they have learned to cut letters freehand and are have been looking at old propaganda posters and discussing the art of persuasion through graphic design.
Susan
SCIENCE
Students this week in science continued their exploration of cells. Building on microscope skills formed last week from discovering cheek cells, they started working with plant cells. They created their own slide from a sample of onion and attempted to make science discoveries. From their cheek cell knowledge last week, they refined technical skills to successfully discover these plant cells. Next week we will increase their knowledge of the internal cells parts.
Mike Noll