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Shana Tovah from Second Grade!

Second graders have been busy preparing for the Rosh Hashannah holiday, and continuing to build this amazing second grade community!

Today they helped cut apples to eat with honey at a special Rosh Hashannah Kabbalat Shabbat. We concluded the celebration by sharing our wishes for the new year ahead. Ask your child what they wished for the class.

It has been a great start to the year, and we wish all the second grade families a Shana Tovah. Your child should have a Rosh Hashannah card for a family member in their bag that went home yesterday or will go home today. They are decorated with Rosh Hashannah symbols that students learned to say and write in Hebrew. May it continue to be a wonderful year of learning, growth, and community.

The second grade team

Shira, Jessica, Marisa, Ilana

Rosh Hashannh- Second grade from Hannah Senesh on Vimeo.

 

Shofar Blowing

Students have been hearing Shira blow the shofar every day, as is customary during the month of Elul. They learned the different names for the kolot (sounds) of the shofar, and practiced saying them as a class. After seeing their teacher, of course students wanted to try on their own! They each had a chance to try and blow a shofar.

Second Grade saying the Kolot for the Shofar from Hannah Senesh on Vimeo.

Shofar Factory with Rabbi Fried

Rabbi Fried visited our classroom to show us how a shofar is made.

Some interesting discussion questions that came up:

Where does a shofar come from? How does it go from being a horn attached to animals horn, to something that can produce sound? What animals can a shofar come from? Why are there shofars from different animals? What does this tell us about where Jews have lived throughout history?

 

Most shofars we use today come from a ram, but there are also shofarot from other horned animals

Learning how to shape our mouths when blowing a shofar

A gemsbok horn

Link to gemsbok shofar being blown

Cow/Bull horns- Ask your child why we don’t use a cow horn on Rosh Hashannah

Sawing the tip off the horn

Sascha and Abby sand the mouth piece. All the students had a chance to do that.

 

Holding pictures of all the different animals we learned about

A rare type of shofar

Drilling a hole to make a mouth piece

Sanding the shofar

Exploring animal pictures

Holding all the horns and shofars

Social Studies

We launched our social studies unit on mapping and landforms with a hands-on way of learning the difference between continents, countries, states, and cities. We read the book Me on The Map by Joan Sweeney to learn more about maps, where we live and how to find where we live on a map. To really understand the difference in the size of a continent versus a country, and a state versus a city, we did a spiral building exercise where a continent, country, state and city were represented by different color blocks. The continent, the largest expanse of land, was the biggest outer most part of the spiral, and had the biggest yellow blocks. The country, state, and city were represented by different blocks and built inside the swirls to signify the largest to smallest. In a second activity second graders used colored strings to create the spiral around themselves and a partner. On index cards they wrote down their continent, country, state, and city, and created the spiral in a collaborative project.

The second graders are fascinated by maps. If you have an interesting map at home you’d like to share with the second graders, please email Jessica and she would love to set up a visit!