October 17, 2019

Advisory

On Friday, October 4, 2019, students traveled to Brooklyn Landmark Elementary School as part of their year-long social action project. We read the book, The Empty Pot, and asked kids to put the events of the story in order. After that, 7th graders asked students to think of moments in the book where the main character displayed honesty, determination, and courage. Volunteers from the organization Repair the World assisted us in classrooms. The volunteers, as well as Sarah Kay and myself, were so impressed with the thoughtfulness and care put into interacting with the kindergarten and first grade students. Great job! Our next book will be The Good Egg.

Here are photos of students reading and preparing activities to go with our next book, The Good Egg:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Humanities

In ELA, students are going to be starting week four vocabulary of Julius Caesar, with words like slanderous, covert, and endure. We will write a paragraph of literary analysis using a tool called TEEER, which stands for Topic, Explain, Evidence, Extend, Refer back. Using this “checklist” for their paragraph, students can ensure they are fully addressing a question and writing in a cohesive way.

 

In social studies, students are continuing to work on writing clearly about the time period of the Roman Empire. They are trying to describe and articulate the features of the Roman Empire at its height and how the civilization began its decline. I am excited to see their growth!

 

Science

We have finished our exploration of simple machines. Students have now been assigned their partners in order to start our first STEAM project of “Rube Goldberg Machines”. The class is filled with exciting ideas and we applying the engineering skills learned in the last unit. Students are focused on creating their detailed blueprints of the “Rube Goldberg Machine”. In the next few weeks we will start the construction of these devices. We cannot wait to see their ideas become relatively. 

 

Mike Noll

 

Hebrew

J – During the past two weeks and as part of the unit “Listen voice,“ students learned about Naomi Shemer. We read about her life, listened and learned new songs that her son wrote about Naomi’s life. This helped us in continuing to learn and review past tense. In addition, we used listening comprehension activities to strengthen comprehension.

K – We learned about the following topics “Surprise Party” and “Creation of the World.” We read different types of texts: articles, dialogues and biblical. This helped us in expanding related vocabulary. In addition, we used listening comprehension activities to strengthen comprehension.

 

Math

The 7th grade has started to learn about integers and their representation in everyday life. They’ve learned that opposites such as left and right, north and south, deposit and withdrawal, or gain and loss can be represented by positive and negative integers. They will be learning the rules of mathematical operations using integers before moving onto the concepts of rational numbers and real numbers as a whole. Learning about the properties of real numbers is the key to a solid foundation for more intense algebraic concepts which the 7th graders will be delving into within the coming weeks.

Judaic Studies

7th graders completed our study of Yom Kippur Mishnayot by focusing on the question of a sick person on Yom Kippur: who decides if a person is too sick to fast — a doctor, or the sick person themselves? In a larger sense, do we know ourselves best, or do other people sometimes know us better than we know ourselves? 7Y will have a vocabulary test this Friday; 7X will have a vocabulary test next Friday.