The Schoolhouse News
We wish your family a gmar chasima tova!
Volume III, Issue 3 September 25, 2009 Yom KIppur
THIS NEWSLETTER IS A HALF‐EDITION (NO TEXT), AS THE FULL EDITION WILL COME OUT BEFORE SUKKOS BREAK. LEFT: Tova paints a tzedakah box to use for Tishrei—a month of increased Torah, tefillah and tzedakah. BELOW: Neshama, Ephraim and Avi act out a self‐written and directed play for the class on how to respect the work of others. The children were totally engaged and cheered them on! UPCOMING DATES: Monday, September 28— SCHOOL CLOSED FOR YOM KIPPUR Thursday, October 1‐Monday, October 12— SCHOOL CLOSED FOR SUKKOS Tuesday, October 20 at 7:30pm— First Parent Curriculum Night‐ Overview and Practical Life
LEFT ABOVE: Avi, Avi, Evan and Mendy assemble the monomial, binomial and trinomial cubes together. These cubes represent a concrete exploration of the mathematical monomial, binomial and trinomial equations that the children will study in elementary. Whenever possible, Montessori math materials progress from concrete to abstract, with concepts being introduced as sen‐ sorial explorations as “seeds” before the child is ready for the abstract un‐ derstanding. RIGHT ABOVE: Avi forms phonetic words with the movable al‐ phabet. This activity allows children to practice sounding out word formation before they are able to write fluidly on paper. LEFT: Dovy, Moshe, Michael and Binyamin play Shabbos bingo with Morah Jaqui in Hebrew. Bingo is an important pre‐language activity, as it requires children to organize their vis‐ ual skills to match like objects (the way they do ultimately with letters). BOT‐ TOM: Yona, Miriam and Paulina scrub chairs. Chair scrubbing is a life skill ac‐ tivity and a great upper‐body motor strengthener.
ABOVE LEFT: Gabi polishes a mirror— polishing is a strengthener for proper three‐finger grip. ABOVE RIGHT: Esti forms the pink tower. LEFT: David, Gavriel and David order the knobless cylinders by height and width. ABOVE: Neshama sorts the third color box by hue—a visual discrimination exercise. LEFT: Avrohom washes windows and squeegees them spotlessly clean.
Elementary
TOP: The elementary class takes a pre‐tashlich trip before Rosh Hashana to prepare for the “real thing.” The children thought up such beautiful resolutions for the new year and “threw” their mistakes into Lake Michigan. ABOVE: Guyli, Tali, Dovid and Mickey act out parts in the Tzom Geda‐ lia play. RIGHT: Kayla forms teen (i.e. 11, 12, 13…) quantities using beads and then stamps them in her math journal to illustrate mastery.
TOP LEFT: Sammy makes a construction paper book of the basic landforms (i.e. island, lake, cape…) after creating them out of clay and wa‐ ter. ABOVE: Lea, Meira Tova and Donny illus‐ trate their favorite animal from the timeline
of life. ABOVE: A whole group of children volunteer to lead the bentching after lunch one day. ABOVE: Chaya Mushka and Guyli pose with the thousand chain—a chain of 1,000 golden beads, grouped by 10s. The children are required to place small tags at intervals of 10 all the way to 1,000—teaching skip counting by 10s, the quantity of 1,000 and the cube of 10.
ABOVE: Happy Birthday, Meira Tova! Meira Tova’s celebration (as it was the first in our class for the year) was a perfect occasion to introduce the story explained by Rashi of how the sun became smaller than the sun during the days of creation.
LEFT: In honor of the end of the last work‐ plan and their last requirement to present a reader’s theater play at lunch, Sara, Chaya Mushka, Malkah and Dovid even made cos‐ tumes to enhance their production. ABOVE: Malkah, Chava Shira and Chaya Mushka pre‐ sent a project they made about the life of Rebbetzin Chana, a holy woman they revere for her mesiras nefesh in preserving Torah at a difficult time in Russian history.
MUSIC CORNER…
by Morah Polina Imas
For the past couple weeks in choir we had a great time learning new songs, focusing on Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur and Sukkot musical material. Our vocal music curriculum is designed to supplement the study of Hebrew language in the classroom. Many of our songs come directly from the Tal Am Hebrew study program, such as the song about the months of the Jewish year the children greatly enjoyed. Another song everyone loved was actually a part of a tefillah “Bi sefer chaim, bracha, v’shalom…”. The moving melody and words really helped the children connect with the meaning of this heartfelt plea, which everyone sang with great passion and feeling. In our pre‐school music classes we focused on the study of beat and rhythm using percussive instrument such as drums. We also introduced the concept of the strong beat and using mo‐ tions and vocal emphasis to feel the strong beat in songs. One of our favorites was the song/ game “Come walk around the village”, where the children practiced anticipating the ending of a musical phrase through motion. We also worked on listening and responding to musical cues and changes in the steady beat through movement. In addition we studied the ABA form in music, by using groups of instruments to represent each of the elements of this pattern. In elementary music we played movement games to develop the concept of inner beat, mak‐ ing a connection between the beat and different notation values such as eighth, quarter, half and whole notes. The goal was to develop the ability to mentally keep track of the number of beats corresponding to each note value. In our advanced and intermediate musicianship classes we mapped out the different layers of musical texture of a song, by laying out small wooden bars to represent beat map, strong beat map and phrase ending map. As this is the basis of music notation, we then broke up into different instrumental groups, with each group “reading” a layer of the musical map we created. I was impressed with the children’s ability to carry on their respective parts and come together as an ensemble to emphasize different lev‐ els of musical texture.