Judaic Studies with Phyllis

Thank you to all of the parents and grandparents who joined us for our Rosh HaShannah presentation last Thursday.  The students were so excited to share their personal reflections about Teshuvah (repentance), Tefila (prayer) and Tzedakah (righteous action).  We began our week by learning about the life of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Ask your child what important life lessons we can learn from this inspirational woman.  In tefila this week we learned about the special prayers for the 10 days of repentance between Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur, heard a moving rendition of Avinu Malkenu that has gone viral and reflected upon why the Book of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur.  As we could not visit the Gowanus, on Tuesday we did Tashlich or the ritual casting of sins by dipping paper with the actions we would like to fix into a bin of water and watching our deeds wash away.  On Wednesday, after our slate (or paper) had been cleaned,  we wrote out goals for the coming year.  We also learned about why Jews wear head coverings on Wednesday by looking at the source on head coverings from the Talmud and reading about the reasons why Jews representing different genders and denominations chose to cover their heads.  Please have a conversation with your child about your family’s head covering traditions and fill out this attached form before next Tuesday.  To end the week students created comics about the Five Steps of Teshuvah (Recognizing what you did wrong, Admitting what you did wrong, Saying you are sorry, Deciding not to do it again, Not doing it again in a similar situation). 

Shana Tova to all – May you have an easy fast and meaningful Yom Kippur.

Hebrew with Rimma and Tomer

Dear 4th Grade Families,

I am so happy to have a second year teaching your children!

It has been two weeks of learning new routines which has also affected our language learning classroom.

We started two tracks for different groups of kids. The units will overlap and will give opportunities to meet the needs of every child. We began the unit “Return to school” which allows students to explore past tense while talking about summer break or weekend. Students are discovering new grammatical structure of past tense in the target language which is different from English. We will continue learning and mastering correct use of past tense during this year.

Simultaneously, some kids started a unit called “Friends“ which allows them to review familiar topics from the last year and successfully climb to the next level step by step.

We look forward to having a joyful learning experience and acquiring productively more Hebrew this year.

Stay safe and healthy.

Shana tova!

Rimma

In the 4th grade Hebrew heritage group, we welcomed students with basic introduction activities such as writing a small essay about themselves and their wishes for the coming year. Then they created a small identification card and were able to converse and ask each other questions between themselves. 

Math with Justin

Over the past two weeks, we have been focusing on place value up to 1,000,000, ordering numbers, comparing numbers as well as adding and subtracting six-digit numbers. Fourth graders also worked on filling in missing numbers in patterns, creating their own patterns, and identifying the rule that defines a pattern. The students are learning how to round to the nearest hundreds place and thousands place to enhance their estimation skills and number sense. This week Fourth Graders also had their first Chromebook math experience of the year as they were introduced to the Math in Focus website, “Ed Your Friend In Learning.” Lastly, fourth graders are starting to see the pre-algebraic powers of bar models and how they can help students approach challenging multi-step word problems. 

Humanities with Hilary

Writing:

We are in the midst of our creative fiction stories, that are connected to realism or personification. Last week, we were on the drafting stage. Here we focused on character work — which is very different from 3rd grade where the focus was on how to get ideas on the page. We looked at our main character, as a whole, thinking about what they physically look like [external traits]  AND what makes them tick or what is happening inside [internal traits]. We then took the main character and looked into their wants and desires of the world (or for this story), and what is stopping them from getting that — or what is the struggle they face. Like in Harry Potter, we discussed the fact that a character might face MANY hurdles throughout a story, and that’s part of what draws a person into the story. Our final step for drafting was creating a story arc (or mountain). This shows the tiny scenes within a small moment, and the steps taken to reach the end. As seen in the picture below, we used The Lion King (animated version) as an example of this. [Si = Simba; N = Nala; M = Mufasa; H = hyenas]

This week, we’ve started the drafting process. We picked one moment from our story arc, and found a way to SHOW — not tell — that part to our audience. We are working on including juicy words in our piece, to really help paint that picture. Some suggestions classmates have had, to support fellow writers, is to:

• describe the setting
• make sure we NAME the characters often, or call them by their name, so that we know who is in the scene
• add sound effects (or onomatopoeias)

Social Studies:

Our first unit goes hand in hand with some hot topics in America. We reviewed everything we learned about New York State and the US Government last year, and added onto it for this year. There was a review of the 3 branches, and what each one does. We expanded by learning about the Electoral College (What is it? Why do we use it?) and the nomination process of a Supreme Court Justice (hold that position for life, need a majority vote from the Senate, don’t need to hold a law degree or be from America to be nominated). While we’ve moved onto another topic — seen below — know that we will be returning to this at the end of October AND again in the late winter. Government is SUCH an important topic, and a goal is for students to be well informed citizens to help them grow up to be well-informed leaders and voters.

This week, we reviewed explorers. Similar to government, this is a topic that will be revisited during our spring unit of Westward Expansion. We did jigsaw learning about explorers, where each student was in charge of learning about a specific explorer, in their group of 4. Through Google Classroom, students then began conversations to learn about the other three explorers. We focused on two explorers who sailed for Spain — Juan Ponce De Leon and Hernando de Soto, who “discovered” and claimed what we now know as the southern states of America (Florida to California). We also focused on two explorers who sailed for France — Robert de la Salle and Samuel de Champlain, who “discovered” and claimed what we now know as Canada, the Mississippi River, and also claimed the land west of the river.

Science with Sammi

Art with Iviva

Fourth graders are returning to a favorite activity — weaving! We watched a video of a contemporary Navajo weaver, D.Y. Begay, who dyes all of her own yarns from soil, fungi and plants she finds in the desert near her home. She even makes her own yarn — she spins wool from her sister’s sheep. While we won’t make our own yarn just yet, Iviva is going to do some natural dye demonstrations. We’ve started putting the vertical yarns (warps) on our looms and some of us even started the next steps in the weaving process. This project integrates with our social studies curriculum. When we start learning about natural dyes, we will also learn a little bit about plants and chemistry, incorporating science.

Music with Heidi

It has been such a treat to see your children again and to meet our new student! In Music class, our Fourth Graders have also been learning Music Class expectations through the words and movements of our Music Rules Rap and getting used to performing it with the steady beat of a metronome. They have begun their study of song creation by learning about the structure/form of musical pieces. This week, they analyzed the structure of BINGO, Skip to My Lou, Three Little Birds, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and a couple of songs of their choosing.

Their “homework” is to notice the structure in the songs they happen to listen to this week and report back to us next Music class. I can’t wait to hear about their musical selections!

Some pictures from our outdoor time together: