Another Year Starts with Summer

Dear Senesh Community,

It’s hard to believe but we are standing at the threshold of the close of another amazing year at HSCDS. We look forward to our last week of learning for our second graders as we review and reflect on all of our projects and accomplishments.  Our garden is blooming with rich color and new verdant shoots of goodness.  Please read on below to learn about specific areas of study.

General Studies – Jacob

Thank you for sharing a piece of your family’s culture with a culture share video. Each video has been engaging, informative, and full of love and warmth. It has been a joy to see and learn about all the meaningful ways you express culture in your homes and lives. Today the children got to present their videos with the pods. Throughout our learning, we have emphasized the importance of respect for the cultures of others, understanding that there are no cultural practices that are better or worse than another. We also acknowledged that it takes bravery to share parts of your culture with others. The second graders were both brave and respectful when presenting their cultural shares with each other, asking questions, and making connections between the many ways culture is expressed.

Math & Science – John

Our final unit on multiplication and division was a long awaited area of interest and enthusiasm for our second grade number crunchers.  They confidently and fearlessly marched into using equal groups with counters and connecting cubes as the concrete foundation for expressing related number facts.  They quickly applied their fluency with repeated addition and subtraction as inverse operations for multiplication and division.  Now, they are skip-counting on their fingers by twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes and tens as they master their times tables in preparation for third grade.  They have also begun to use number bonds to break up two-digit numbers like 80 into four groups of twenty, twenty groups of four, two groups of forty, forty groups of two and connect them with multiplication and division sentences.

For our final weeks, our scientists have had multiple opportunities to align what they learned this semester on the importance of soil as a natural resource of the earth with how we can save it.  They have learned how windbreaks, composting, crop rotation, terrace farming, and growing plants with healthy root structures protect our soil from erosion through our efforts as humans to conserve it as a valuable source of life.  Our scientists understand how water sometimes shapes our earth in ways which are not particularly beneficial for the planet.  They had a chance to express our environmental challenges and how we can overcome them in our final Soil Erosion project.  Our future web designers produced digital murals composed of web images and colorful sticky notes which we are all so proud to see fastened in the backs of their science journals.  Please be sure to request a private showing sometime next week.

Hebrew & Judaic Studies – Ariana

It’s hard to believe that the school year is coming to an end.  What a year!  The 2nd grade students were the source of my inspiration. We learned together joyfully from the first day to the last. 

In the past weeks, we prepared for our Chumash celebration.  The children absolutely rocked it.  The Chumash Celebration was a meaningful milestone worthy to remember for them and their families.  This week, we did an activity with our buddies from 6th grade.   The 6th grade sent us videos and posters to teach us about the value of recycling. We made mini posters to share what we learned and made a video to thank them for teaching us the valuable lesson of reusing, reducing and recycling.  One group even created a puzzle 

In Hebrew we continue working on our Choveret Chaverim be Ivrit learning examples to say “Shayachut”, that we have something. For example “Yesh lecha Kelev,Yeah lach sefer”.  We continue praying Tefillah daily too.  This week we also celebrated the Summer birthdays.  We will continue celebrating next week and reflecting about our amazing accomplishments this year.

Looking forward to our last week in 2nd grade!

Music – Heidi

In Music, Second Graders sang and played their rhythm sticks and shakers to Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Then they learned about the instruments of rock and pop bands. To explore this, they watched the Go-Go’s We Got the Beat and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Then, for fun, we explored the instruments the Muppets used in their version of Bohemian Rhapsody, too.

Our last week of school is an important one to celebrate our learning, review lessons well learned and share our goals and areas of interest for next year.  Please stay tuned for a final blog next week as our warm spring days and fertile garden flourishes into our green foothills of summer.