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Reflections for Rosh Hashanah

Dear Friends,

The sound of the shofar – the ram’s horn – being blown by dozens of school-aged children wakes me from my early morning haze. Its blast reminds me that teshuvah – turning, return, repentance – brings with it a sense of heightened awareness and responsibility. And with it gratitude that I engage in this sacred process with my students as my guides.

I believe in the transformative power of Jewish education.

Its power derives from generations finding meaning through storytelling and action, a commitment to justice combined with mercy, and a recognition that tradition is sustainable only when it accepts innovation.

Jewish education empowers us to respond to the world as it is with a vision for what it might become.

I believe that Jewish education has the capacity to inspire us to become more ethical, more empathic, more committed to justice and compassion. Like the blast of the shofar, it awakens us, propelling us to honor the old while embracing the new.

I write this as we continue to watch hurricanes turn the lives of millions upside down, while the tensions from Charlottesville and elsewhere remain a fresh memory, and as politics in the U.S. and around the world continue to make many feel more vulnerable, more confused, and less connected.

Yet I remember that the rabbis tell us that it is by the breath of children God sustains the world. I believe that it is indeed in the next generation that my hope is rekindled.

And, as we welcome the start of a new school year at the Jewish Community Day School of RI during the same time that Jews in Rhode Island and around the world celebrate Rosh Hashanah, I am filled with the faith that one derives from new beginnings and from the potential of an exceptional community of children, their families, and of staff, faculty and supporters – all of whom make our holy work possible.

May this year of learning together empower our children – and us – to bring to the world more light, more compassion, and more justice.

Shanah Tovah Umetukah – a happy and sweet New Year.

Andrea Katzman, Head of School

Education for the Future

Read about our innovative curriculum in the latest edition of East Side Monthly magazine. We are proud to be highlighted in the September issue for our Design Lab as well as our unique partnership with Brown/RISD KinderSTEAM. In fact, “we are the only school on the East Side with {a Design Lab} completely dedicated to elementary school students.” Read more about Design Thinking and our focus on 21st century skills here.

 

Welcome back to school!

School is open! JCDSRI teachers and administrators happily welcomed back students this week. After a busy summer of facility upgrades and renovations, it was wonderful to hear children’s voices and see smiling faces back in school. Students arrived to find a newly expanded music room, design lab, learning center and a new outdoor sitting area featuring a free lending library.

We expressed our excitement with messages on our “Happiness Wall” in the lobby. Everyone in our community was asked to add a message to the wall expressing a happy moment from the first week of school. Here are a few:

My happy moment was …
“…reading in kindergarten”
“…the first day of school party”
“…when I saw Ms. Silva”
“…playing on the maze on the blacktop”
“…doing my rest time work”
“This school is so nice and this week I feel so nice about this school” (from a new student)

Opening day ended with our annual back to school block party – a fun celebration to start the year. Parent volunteers arranged games, face painting, snacks, and a visit from the ice cream truck. Children also enjoyed getting soaked in the famous home-made dunk tank.

The tone has been set for a joyful, connected and active year ahead!

                   

Meet Our Head of School, Andrea Katzman

Andrea’s formal teaching career began over a decade ago in the Department of Education at Rhode Island College, where she guided teachers as they learned to create diverse, safe, and democratic classrooms. Eager for the opportunity to put educational theory into practice, Andrea became a Pre-K teacher at JCDSRI, where she created learning experiences based on principles of progressive education. Two years ago, Andrea returned to the university classroom, teaching in the Schoolman Graduate School of Jewish Education at Hebrew College. For over 10 years, Andrea has worked at JCDSRI as a classroom teacher, a teacher-leader, and is currently JCDSRI’s Principal. She will assume the position of head of school in July, 2017.

In her work, Andrea is particularly drawn to accompanying people through transitions. She has had the privilege of helping young children through the beginning stages of their formal education, supporting adults as they embark on their new careers as teachers, and guiding parents through uncertain or challenging experiences. She looks forward to accompanying JCDSRI through its next iteration as a center for learning, collaboration, and innovation.

Andrea brings years of teaching and administrative experience to her new position along with expertise in creating and executing social-emotional curricula, in mentoring teachers, in nurturing partnerships with families and communities, and in educational theory – particularly around constructivism and progressive education.

Andrea is committed to leading JCDSRI from strength to strength while providing a powerful voice to the chorus of those reshaping the landscape of Jewish education.

Andrea lives in Providence with her husband Steve and is the proud parent of two JCDSRI alumnae, Ariela ’09 and Elie ’13.

Design helps define Jewish experience for next generation

Ask a four-year-old what matters most about the classroom furniture that she helped design with local college students, and you get an insightful response.

“That I can draw on it,” said Ellie, a pre-K student, who with her classmate, Ziva, sketched atop the shiny white surface of the new “hub” delivered to their classroom in the Jewish Community Day School (JCDS) of Rhode Island.

The pre-K children and their classmates designed the hub with a group of students from an engineering class at Brown University.

Their collaborative ideas, drawings and prototypes eventually became a new seven-sided, green-and-blue, multi-unit, shelved furniture hub that the Brown students built and delivered to the JCDS classroom.

About every week, students from Brown and from the Rhode Island School of Design visit JCDS to work with children on developing furniture, games, play huts and other objects of everyday design.

“An important goal of this partnership is to develop an innovative design curriculum for kids, combining design and Jewish values, while strengthening collaborations within our diverse community,” said Ian Gonsher, assistant professor of practice in Brown’s School of Engineering, and JCDS Board of Trustees member.

This partnership is “in part, about what Jews put into the world, and the creative process that makes that possible,” he said. “It is about how we are preparing the next generation to make their contribution.

Collaboration draws heavily on Gonsher’s design teachings at Brown.

“These combine cultivating individual creative practice, empathy and understanding for those we design for, and translating those ideas into prototypes, which give JCDS children the chance to share and iterate upon their ideas. Prototypes may be a physical model or a drawing, but a story or conversation, as well.”

In the hub project, for example, students from his engineering capstone design class visited pre-K youngsters to gather information (research), plan (designs on paper evolved into final designs made of cardboard), and then implement (the college students built and delivered the piece).

The Brown students returned to observe how its pre-K occupants used the furniture, gathering feedback on ways to improve the item. “This benefits both older students and younger students, in part, because working with people of different ages gives you different perspectives from which to understand your creative process,” Gonsher said.

At the feedback session, several children drew atop the hub, which is topped by a white polyethylene surface (the marks wash off with soap and water).

Ellie sketched a series of cobalt-blue-colored arches, which she called “a bridge.” Meanwhile, her classmate, Ziva, drew a forest-green-colored horizontal “balloon and string,” which stretched across each section of the hub.

Asked about the new furniture, four-year-old Micah replied, “I love the bright colors. And the places to put toys.”

For the Brown students, the project remained incomplete until they could deliver the piece and observe how the children used it, said Brown seniors Jeremy Joachim and Robert “Robbie” Petteruti Jr., who worked with three peers on the hub.

“We also wanted to learn what the students called the piece when it was placed in the classroom, and what rules and rituals developed with its use,” said Joachim.

The pre-K children were “very open to the Brown students, who were very open to the pre-K ideas,” said Laurie Noorparvar, Pre-K Lead GS Teacher.

“Our class loves to experiment and to brainstorm,” said Hillary Schulman, Pre-K and Kindergarten Assistant.

Over the last few months, another group of Gonsher’s students worked with pre-K children on drawings and cardboard prototypes for a play hut and for a “Quiet House.”

They also collaborated with the 3rd Grade class in JCDS’s Design Lab to build prototypes for a “Recharging Station.” “Recharging” in this case refers to a place for the children to renew and refresh during the course of the school day.

JCDS emphasizes “Design Thinking,” which it defines as a human-centered way to “look at needs, problems, and solutions by putting people and values first.” The Design Lab is “a space where students explore engineering concepts and translate their knowledge, empathy, and ideas into action.”

“It is strength for JCDS not to have a rigid structural curriculum,” said, Adam Tilove, Head of School. “So, we can say yes to exciting opportunities for our children to learn from Brown and RISD students. Partnership between our small school and Brown and RISD is an exciting educational endeavor.”

In another collaboration, 15-or-so college students from Gonsher’s Design Studio class, worked with first graders to design and build new games such as a “hallway catapult.” Sketches became cardboard prototypes improved through both play and work in the Design Lab. The first graders wrote game rules and then re-tested final prototypes with fifth-grade “buddies.”

“Out of this unique, special collaborative relationship, between Brown, RISD and JCDS, a creative community is emerging, as well as interdisciplinary and inter-institutional ways to think about creative output,” said Gonsher.

“This kind of progressive education embraces creativity and design, empowering students and giving value and meaning to ideas.”

Gonsher hopes a larger dialogue about Jewish identity and creativity emerges from the partnership.

“It’s a conversation about how Jewish values and creativity align. It’s about how this generation, and this iteration of Jewish learning, might contribute to the very long tradition of Jewish education we have inherited.”

Using design as a guide to how the next generation will define its Jewish experience means that students from Brown and RISD will continue to visit JCDS. There, they will ask children, some as young as three, what is in their imagination, and how, together, they can turn those dreams into something real.

Watch the creation of the Hub!

Global Cardboard Challenge Was a Hit!

jcdsri-cardboard-challenge-2016

 

Just build it! That was the theme of the day for dozens of children and parents who dropped in for some creative building at the JCDSRI Global Cardboard Challenge. Inspired by Caine’s Arcade, this fun annual event encourages children to design and build with cardboard and recycled material. It’s a community play-date that unleashes your child’s imagination! In case you missed it, here’s what it looked like in under 1 minute:

JCDS Cardboard Challenge 2016 from Jewish Community Day School RI on Vimeo.

JCDSRI Partnership Featured by RI Foundation

We are delighted that our partnership with the Islamic School of RI (ISRI) was featured on the Rhode Island Foundation’s blog. Funded with the support of the RI Foundation’s Bliss, Gross, Horowitz Fund, the project brought together fifth graders from both JCDSRI and ISRI for a theater collaboration at the Center for Dynamic Learning (CDL). Please click below to read more and watch a short video!

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Promoting Peace & Understanding

ZosiaDrawingJCDSRI’s partnership with the Islamic School of RI (ISRI) resulted in a wonderful performance on April 17th put together by fifth graders from both schools. Approximately 150 people attended the event, including Congressman David Cicilline, who tweeted photos of the “inspiring performances” by the students. The Providence Journal wrote about the event in Monday’s paper, including a photo gallery, as well.

For the past several months. students from both schools met twice each week at the Center for Dynamic Learning (CDL), getting to know each other and developing their dramatic skills. Students explored issues of identity, society, and friendship through CDL’s hands-on STEAMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Manufacturing and Math) theater program.

The project was funded through a generous grant from the Bliss, Gross, Horowitz Fund at the Rhode Island Foundation. Both schools look forward to continuing the partnership in the future.

JCDSRI Featured by YU School Partnership!

Screen Shot 2016-04-18 at 10.45.47 AMWe are very pleased that our Head of School, Adam Tilove, was featured in a conversation about innovation in schools in the YUSP Spring 2016 Quarterly. While it was our billboard that caught their attention initially, JCDSRI’s reputation as a leader in STEAM and design preceded us: in fact, Mr. Tilove was mentioned in the YUSP Fall 2015 Quarterly, as well. Our commitment isn’t just to STEAM, though; we want our graduates to be good citizens, in both their local and global communities. That’s why we also have an ongoing partnership with the Islamic School of RI. We encourage our students to consider ideas from multiple viewpoints and to be respectful of different backgrounds and beliefs.

As the only school in southeastern New England with a Design Lab dedicated exclusively to elementary students, we believe strongly in a progressive curriculum that gives children plenty of opportunities to engage in authentic problem-solving. Our students, from Pre-Kindergarten through 5th grade, speak the language of Design Thinking: they employ empathy, they create prototypes, and they “fail fast” so that they can address the needs of a specific audience. Want to see our students in action? Call or email us and come for a visit!

STEAM in Action: Laurence Humier Visit

In late January, Laurence Humier, a Be24306780639_1ff6d87552_klgian architectural engineer who works in Milan, presented to our parents on the topic “Science and Young Children.” Ms. Humier’s work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art, and she was recently honored with the title of Knight of Merit Walloon by the Belgian government. Her work combines expressiveness, experimentation, science and art in unique ways.

Ms. Humier spent a full 24378947170_d217ae8c20_kday working with students in Kindergarten through Grade 5, leading them in an exploration of the properties of common household ingredients (such as baking powder, cornstarch, and talcum powder). After investigating the reactions and textures produced by combining various ingredients with colored water, the students created their own mixtures to construct self-portraits.

The students learned a lot, got their hands dirty, and had a ball! 24647497236_fc7bda4d3f_k