April 8: Spring Rolls In
Humanities In reading, we are moving onto a new class novel, Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman. I have taught Seedfolks for many years and love this book! It is a beautiful story about a diverse community who come together to build a garden in their worn-down neighborhood in Cleveland. As we read, we will focus on immigrant stories, lost languages, women in history, community leaders, and how each individual can make a difference. Your students will be tasked with charting each character’s background, motivation for helping the community, and the character’s struggle. They will also be given vocabulary assignments and quizzes. In... Read More
3rd Grade: 4/8
Is Spring here? The weather has been a little up and down lately, in true March fashion, but now that April has begun, hopefully there is only warm weather ahead! Our highlight these past two weeks was our trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. In school we learned all about the construction of the bridge, looking at old photographs and figuring out the order that the different parts were built. The story of the building of the bridge took one unexpected turn after another. First John Roebling dies from injuries sustained to his foot while scoping the land before the bridge... Read More
2nd Grade Blog: 4/8
During Writer’s Workshop the second grade authors have begun a fiction unit! We began by reading and immersing ourselves in series books. We dove into Henry and Mudge and as readers we first studied how Cynthia Rylant writes her series books. The students discovered that Cynthia starts writing each book with the main characters and settings, that she keeps the main characters throughout the series and that there is either a problem and solution or an event (similar to a small moment) in each one. Next we started with prewriting! The students began by brainstorming their main characters and created... Read More
First Grade News
Dear Families, This week in Math, students are practicing how to count big numbers quickly. We are using place value blocks (base ten blocks) to count by tens and add on ones. Soon, we will be adding these numbers together! Students are reporting they had a lot of fun playing our subtraction dinosaur games at home. Look out for more games next week! Our readers are going on adventures in fiction! Before we dive into a storybook, we remember to take a sneak peek by looking over the cover, title, table of contents, blurb, and inside of the book. We... Read More
Kindergarten Blog 4/8
Dear Kindergarten Families, Kindergarten is ready for Pesach! We have been learning holiday songs and the holiday story, and we even have our own classroom megillot. This week we had our Family Museum, in which we invited our fourth grade buddies and other friends of kindergarten to see the children’s hard work on their family collages, model magic sculptures, and decorated homes of their families for our family unit. The kindergarteners made cookies for the museum cafe, and tickets for entry for the invitees. At the end of the event, the kindergarteners performed the song “Love Makes a Family”.... Read More
April 8, 2022
HUMANITIES 7th graders has one week left to complete their class novels for the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) project. With a healthy amount of debating, arguing, and compromising, each class’ novel is coming into form. The 7th grade is also in the midst of our Holocaust and Human Behavior unit. Students have read Anne Frank’s graphic biography, will start reading her diary next week, and have learned about the evolution of antisemitism, World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, and the struggles of the Weimar Republic. Today, the students listened to the story of Holocaust survivor Sami Steigman, and... Read More
6th Grade News: 4/8/22
Humanities These past few weeks, students worked hard to write, edit, and polish their Rome research essays about a wide range of topics, including Roman engineering, architecture, art, and more. They should be proud of their final drafts; for most of them, it’s the longest essay they’ve ever written at 6-8 paragraphs! Students also learned how to adapt ideas from research and cite their sources responsibly, writing both in-text citations within the body of the essay as well as a complete and properly-formatted bibliography at the end of the essay. I’m sure you’ve seen your child working hard on their... Read More
8th Grade in April
Happy April and Happy Spring to everyone! Humanities Over the past few weeks, 8th Grades have concluded their study of the nonfiction novel Just Mercy, in which lawyer Brian Stevenson defends his clients on death row. The students ended the unit with a discussion-based Socratic Seminar that they led completely independently. Students did a wonderful job questioning and dialoging with each other in a respectful manner on a contentious and controversial topic! Students are now reading Maus by Art Spiegelman and we are studying the Holocaust in history class. Using curriculum from Facing History’s Holocaust and Human Behavior unit, students... Read More
Kindergarten Blog 4/1
Dear Kindergarten Families, This week was the second week of collecting donations for Ali Forney, an organization that helps unhoused teenagers. Sixth grade is running the school-wide penny drive, and three sixth graders came to our class on Wednesday to tell us more about Ali Forney. Kindergarteners have loved watching the donations we’ve collected grow! The penny drive will continue on until Pesach break. The kindergartener scientists are now experts on what living things need to live and grow, and this week we asked the important question of where living things get the things they need to live... Read More
First Grade News
Dear Families, In the Hebrew classroom, we started to learn about Pesach (Passover)! We reviewed the story of Pesach. We spoke about the different symbols of the holiday, including the hagadah, the seder plate (kearat seder), and matzah. We learned that Pesach has 4 names: Chag Hapesach, Chag Haaviv (the spring holiday), Chag Hacherut (the holiday of freedom) and Chag Hamatzot. We are going to continue to learn more about Pesach throughout next week. We also learned how to write the letters pey, fey, chaf sofit and samech in script and continued practicing our reading and writing in Hebrew. The first graders were so excited to learn the Hatikvah – the national anthem of Israel. We spoke... Read More