Humanities with Hilary

Dear 4th Grade Families,

I cannot believe that this crew has finished their first piece of writing! We have been working hard since the end of September on this piece. We have made sure to include characters, who have dialogue with others as well as internal thinking. Students remembered to follow their story arc, to help give structure or a skeleton to their story. The 4th Graders referenced our list of unusable words (like “good,” “stuff,” “thing,” “nice” and more), to make sure that they used more descriptive and specific words in their story, all to help paint a clearer picture of the writer’s thinking. These stories have a beginning, middle + end, that there is a problem with a solution in the story, a climax of action in the story — so many different aspects to what makes a story a story!

In Social Studies, we began to explore the 13 colonies, and are comparing what life was like in the New England Colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut), Middle Colonies (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware), and the Southern Colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia). So far, we have created an agriculture/natural resources map and looked into religious beliefs and level of tolerance for each colony section. We also touched on the Triangular Trade Route, also called the Transatlantic Slave Route, observing who were and what was traded in each part of the route — a deep topic, and the topic of Africans, enslaved people, and black people in America is one that will be continued throughout the year.

 

 

In SEL (or Social Emotional Learning) we have been talking about identity. What it means, using books like Positive Me by Madelyn Hornstein. The book can be found here (or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5sWrm4oGq8). We have associated identity with our ELA skill of determining external and internal character traits. Today we played a little game. We needed to write a fact about ourselves that others don’t know — but we felt comfortable WITH our classmates knowing. I then read each fact aloud, and the students guessed who it was about. No one answered until the big reveal at the end. We learned many things about the size of our families, our favorite/most disliked food, places we want to travel to, our favorite song/artist, our names, and MORE! Identity can show us how we are similar and different to one another, and our identity is what makes us us. This is a topic we’ll continue exploring throughout the year.

Shabbat Shalom!

Hilary

Math with Justin

Fourth graders have been working hard on their multiplication and division skills. Students have been work to master multi-digit multiplication using different methods including the area model, partial products, and the standard algorithm. Ask your student about their favorite way to do multi-digit multiplication. This week, we started learning about division including long division with remainders. Looking forward, our learners will be taking what they have learned and start applying it to real-world problems including multiple steps and bar models for visualization. 

 

Hebrew Heritage with Tomer

The 4th grade heritage students are immersed in learning about Israel culture. We explore different iconic figures of Israel and the students read, converse, create video about the subject.

 

Music with Heidi

In Music class, our Fourth Graders have been practicing reading rhythmic notation and playing rhythms on rhythm sticks. In addition, Fourth Graders have been reviewing the song Eli Eli, a poem by Hannah Senesh set to music by Israeli composer David Zehavi. As they practice all of this, they are also gaining the skill of playing and singing in time together. You can look forward to hearing them sing Eli Eli on Kesher Day!