6th Grade News: 2/26 – 3/2/18

HUMANITIES 

This week in Literature, we completed several activities to wrap up our study of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. In order to better imagine the lives of characters in the book, students wrote letters from the perspectives of African American citizens living in the South during the 1930s. They wrote about their struggles living under particular Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation in parks, restaurants, schools, and other public spaces. I’m looking forward to reading their letters, and I’m hopeful that this exercise helped build the students’ sense of empathy and understanding of persecution.

In History, we dug deeper into the lives of five famous pharaohs: Hatshepsut, King Tut, Akhenaten, Rameses II, and Cleopatra. In order to share what they learned about these leaders, students wrote original “eulogies” to each of them — as if they were attending the pharaohs’ funerals. Their speeches creatively outlined each leader’s values and accomplishments. We definitely had our share of fake funeral tears as well…

Lastly, in Writing class, students worked on enhancing their sentences and paragraphs using a wide variety of transition words. We also learned about bibliographies, and practice correctly formatting bibliography entries for websites, books, videos, and interviews. The students will include bibliographies as well as in-text citations in the final drafts of their “Social Issues Essays,” which they are completing for next Wednesday.

JUDAICS

Purim week was a blast! We had great conversation surrounding the history of opinions about Women being obligated or allowed to read Megillah. We saw that opinions changed in the main halachic texts. It was interesting to discuss why these changes may have been made. Students were able to look at these sources in their original form and translate them closely to see the differences. Students then wrote their own Rabbinic response to the topic and included their opinion as well as their reasoning. They reflected on how their society has impacted their opinion. At the end of the week we started back with our Chumash text. We are looking closely at the first 5 psukim in Shemot 3 when Moshe encounters the burning thorn bush. Students shared what metaphors they saw in this scene and we started to think about what this scene looked like. Next week we will be look at Midrash connected to this moment and looking at historical and modern depictions of this text.

Shabbat Shalom!

Laura

HERITAGE HEBREW 

הורים יקרים,

השבוע המשכנו לעסוק ביחידה ספורט ישראלי באוליפידה. השינשינים הגיעו אלינו וערכו פעילות מהנה ברוח חג הפורים.

חג פורים שמח,

אילנה

ADVISORY

The whole school showed up in costumes on Thursday to celebrate Purim. Our creative 6th graders represented boxes of maccaroni, famous paintings and painters, basketball players, jellyfish, and more. Enjoy the photos from our celebration!

HEBREW

Dear parents,

This week, the students in HaKbatza Aleph finished the unit on past tense and started the unit on Future tense. The students in HaKbatza bet studied formulating general statements vs specific statements using the preposition ET and ET HA.

On Friday, the two groups were reunited in writing a skit and acting it out.

I wish you a relaxing weekend,

Andreea