The Schoolhouse News
We wish your family a year of sweetness and blessings!
Volume III, Issue 2 September 17, 2009 ROSH HASHANAH
LEFT: Rivki works with the metal insets—a set of metal stencils of various geometric plane shapes. This is the first Montessori step to handwrit‐ ing, as it prepares the hand for various strokes through pic‐ tures. BELOW: Reb Moshe gives a lesson about H‐shem’s “scales” on Rosh HaSahana, as the children share their ideas of favorite mitzvos (represented by glowing jewels).
LEFT: Tova matches the baric tablets—small wooden blocks of varying weights—while blindfolded. BELOW: Yosef Shalom practices hammering.
CENTER LEFT: Chana and Paulina polish the class plants. CENTER RIGHT: Dovy matches cylinders with like shaker sounds. LEFT: Yona and Miriam share the book corner. ABOVE: Neshama punches round challah pictures with a jumbo pushpin (an activity to promote 3‐finger grip).
ABOVE LEFT: Michael has a GREAT time grinding coffee! ABOVE RIGHT: Bea and Yosef Shalom wash the windows together—complete with squeegee. LEFT: Avrohom matches color tab‐ lets—a visual discrimination exercise that increases in difficulty to hues and shades in subsequent boxes. RIGHT: Dovy, Ephraim, Avi, Gavriel, Dovie and Yitzchak stand in front of the brown stair and pink tower “megatower” created by Avi, Gavriel and Dovie. In the end, the tower almost reached to the ceiling!
It seems like it should always be that the last week of the year be the busiest. Certainly, everyone is running around making their final purchases, some people are even able to start cooking to get a jump on things. Still others use the final week of the year to ask Hashem for help or forgiveness. It is an interesting thing to me that the school year begins before Rosh Hashana and all of the Yomim Tovim. We start the year out, go to school for a week or two, take off for Rosh Hashana, come back for a week, go off for Yom Kippur, come back again for a day or two and then—WHEW!—we are off for Sukkos!! It seems as though we are just starting to make some headway with all of the children understanding the ground rules and then we have to stop and learn it all over again. I have come to realize that there is a purpose in all of this. When your child comes to this school and hears the shofar on a daily basis before Rosh Hashana, when we tell a story about the funny tashlich fish that came up and ate the little girl’s mistakes, or when your child has an opportunity to share the apples they picked at the Yom Tov table they begin to weave the fabric of their Jewish Life with the days between school and home. This is reality, this is why we are all here, that our educational and religious ex‐ periences should be so closely connected that we become wrapped in its warmth. And so, when I look at the weaving of our days between school and home for yom tov I see the unique opportunity to reinforce, vital‐ ize, and color what we have already learned. Though this week was a short week it certainly was filled with a very busy school and children. Many of the children have been working very hard. We are trying to keep up with them as they make their way through the materials. A few children have made it through most of the introductory math works, many of the chil‐ dren have made it through most of the practical life activities, and all of the children are enthusiastic about being with each other. On Tuesday the full‐day children had the opportunity to visit the Royal Oaks apple orchard. A full service apple orchard, Royal Oaks also has a great barn and betting zoo. We all totally en‐ joyed ourselves on the hayride, picking apples (lift and twist) and the presentation about apples in the Teepee. In order to give you an opportunity to review the lessons and stories that we went over this week below are some conversations starters: I presented a scale to the children and put dull rocks in on one side while telling a story about a little girl and things that she said and did in the course of a year. Then I started putting larger beauti‐ ful crystals in on the other side for all of the positive things that the girl did during the year. In the end, even though there may have been less “crystals” than rocks the weight of doing a “good” thing was heavier then making a “mistake.” All along I have been blowing the shofar and having the children jump to the blasts. Tekiah, one jump; Teruah, three jumps; Shvarim, jump like crazy. By the end of the week this week I moved from jumping to raising hands for a more quiet Shul experience. I told a story about a little girl who goes to the river for Tashilich. As she is saying the prayer fish keep jumping up to grab the “mistakes” she made and carry them away. When the girl con‐ cludes one fish looks at her with big fishy eyes and she remembers one more “mistake” in her own words and throws it into the river where the fish jumps up, does a flip and a twist, and dives back into the river with a splash. To accompany this story some of the children painted a picture of the river and the fish inside as a reminder of Tashlich. We made up a story about members of the class who came to a Rosh Hashana Seudah. We talked about the different foods we eat on Rosh Hashana and what they mean. Round challahs are to show that the year started at one point and ended there, like a circle. We eat a Rimon (pomegranate) so that in the coming year we will do as many mitzvahs as there are seeds. We apples in honey for a sweet New Year. We eat of the fish head to show that we should be like the head and not the tail. Thursday we plan on making Tzedakah Boxes with the children. We would like to wish you all and your families a wonderful New Year full of good health, parnasah, and learning. Kasiva v’Chasima Tova to each of you. Reb Moshe, Morah Miriam, Morah Maura, Morah Jacqui
Apple Picking was amazing! This year was the best trip in the history of the school...thank you to Liebie Zeller, Tanya Weissman, and Alla Stavnitser for coming along and thank you to Chana Mandelbaum for finding us the school bus. We watched a movie about the apple lifecycle in a teepee, rode a tractor around the orchard, saw the beehives, picked apples, visited the animals and climbed on play trucks. It was a wonderful time...plus we got back on time!!!
Elementary
PREPARING OURSELVES FOR TISHREI THROUGH SCIENCE This week we continued our exploration of Creation with the second Great Lesson— “How H‐shem Brought Life to Earth.” We conducted several experiments, as well as discussed the unique characteristics of invertebrates and vertebrates. On Thursday we continued by unrolling the giant timeline of life (see below). Each child found his or her animal or plant on the timeline as we talked about the rise and fall of algae, trilobites, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. Some children began to illustrate examples of vertebrates and invertebrates in their science journals (see below). They will then choose one animal to research further. Still others continued with volcano research from last week. The purpose of these early research projects is to expose the children to the value of questioning. They are given post‐ it notes to compose questions that they answer and collage on group posters for collaborative display. This helps them build on each other’s ideas and research. Later, they will learn to transfer these answer facts into para‐ graphs and research papers.
ABOVE: The class watches the presentation of the Timeline of Life. LEFT: Manny, Kayla and Ben illustrate vertebrates and invertebrates. ABOVE: Guyli and Chava Shira add volcano facts to the class poster.
MORE PREPARING FOR ROSH HASHANAH...Last Friday we were treated to a hands‐on demonstration by sofer Rabbi Natan of how sifrei Torah are constructed. Ask you child to tell you the steps...Everyone enjoyed feeling the animals skins and seeing the ingredients for ink. Rabbi Natan even cut a feather for our class to keep to use for “practicing” our letters. Thank you to all of the parents who remembered to send machzorim with your child. He or she is bring‐ ing home their book with special picture book‐ marks to help make spending time in shul more meaningful. The bookmarks include the pictures of some of the tefillos we say at school as well as sto‐ ries and important info.
Many children participated in several art activities for the holiday—we squeezed rimon seeds into a watercolor wash to make stencil prints, we learned how to modge podge by shading prints of the chodashim and collaging them on push‐ kas and some people made mats of the simonim for the Rosh Hashanah meal. Others were busy pressing fossil molds or writing stories with Rosh HaShanah themes.
AND...The children continue to enjoy getting to know each other. Each day we group different combinations of children into clusters of three or four to teach each other/learn new work. Here you see some combinations...Esther and Tali make drawings of the seasons as they learn to spell the season names. Esti, Mendel and Ari pose after matching phonetic word cards to‐ gether. Eliyahu, Sammy and Donny work to make syllabification charts in their journals. Mickey and Donny practice adding decimal numbers with the stamp game. Guyli, Malkah and Dovid review triangle properties by side and angle. The children are already becoming very responsible for tracking their own work‐ plans...next week we will send home journals for you to see the work they have been doing.