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23 Apr 2021
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Friday, April 23 — April Showers Bring ….

Hebrew Heritage with Tomer

The 4th grade heritage strengthened their vocabulary and how to use keywords in past tense. We are also getting ready to Lag Bomer and learning about the history that led to that event.

Judaic Studies with Phyllis

After learning the stories about the upstanding communities in Billings, Montana (Not in Our Town) and Denmark during World War Two The fourth graders delved deep into the moral question of whether  “good people’s silence” can be “as damaging as the bad people’s actions.” They reinforced their understanding of the vocabulary “perpetrator, victim, bystander and upstander” by creating visual representations of the different roles in a hate crime. Many students chose to depict the incident of someone throwing a brick through a Jewish boy’s window in Billings, Montana, while others focused on recent hate crimes against Asian Americans and still others depicted the killing of George Floyd! Check out a couple of the pictures below.
 
This week I was amazed at how quickly and easily the fourth graders jumped back into Chumash. Dividing the story of “Rivka’s Plan” (Genesis 27:6-17) into three sections allowed me to differentiate chevrutah work so that students are challenged at their individual levels. After translating their section, the students will teach the rest of the class through a google presentation or comic strip.

Humanities with Hilary

Dear 4th Grade Families,

What a week it has been! The pods won MULTIPLE things this week, including the Penny Drive! Today, we celebrated with a Pajama Day AND extra recess. Each group was able to experience a Middle School perk of playing on the Mirpeset. Movin’ on up!

This week, in Social Studies, we started a specific discussion about the history of slavery in America. We went back in time to Colonial America (throughout the week) and thought about the different jobs you would find, trying to decide if that job is connected to the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. We realized that even if it is through six degrees of separation, every job was either a part of or connected to slavery. Blacksmiths, who made the chains. Cooks/Bakers/Millers/Butchers, who provided food for the journey. Brewers/Distillers who turned sugarcane into rum, which was brought to Africa. Merchants were in charge of the trades. Then, the taxes on enslaved people and the “import” of those people helped pay for the construction of the roads, buildings and more. So eye-opening how interconnected everything was … Next we explored the lives of two black people who were brought to or born in Virginia, and how the rules about those of African descent changed from 1619 to 1670. Their names are Anthony “Antonio, the Negroe” Johnson and Elizabeth Key.

Before starting our next writing unit, we focused on parts of speech throughout the week. We started by finding nouns, verbs and adjectives in sentences. 4th Graders also learned when a describing word is an adjective (for nouns) and when it is an adverb (for verbs). We even got to make our own MADLIBS this week!! This was a great way to have students think about parts of speech as well as story structure. Many of the students mentioned how much fun they had in writing this week. The spelling homework assignment was to write a story, and they needed to remember to have a beginning, middle and end. A majority of the students re-wrote fairytales, either telling it from a new perspective or changing the characters, such as telling the story of Cinderella from the perspective of one step-sister or “Big Blue Driving Skirt” (instead of “Little Red Riding Hood”). Others wrote realistic fiction stories, sort of related to their lives. It was a wonderful and fun activity!

Future Reminders:

  • Friday, April 30 — Lag B’Omer
  • Monday and Tuesday, May 17/18 — NO SCHOOL for Shavuot
  • Thursday, June 3 — 4th Grade Publishing Party

Science with Sammi

The fourth graders have been learning about viruses and vaccines over the last month and a half. Throughout this unit, they have learned some very complex information about how pathogens get into and spread in our bodies,  how our immune system protects our body, and how five different types of vaccines train our bodies to avoid future infections.

Over the last 2.5 classes, students have applied this knowledge into informational comics and posters. They really got creative with these comics/posters and students showed their knowledge in diverse ways.  Look out for an email sharing this work with you soon!

 

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