My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks

April 1, 2015March 30, 2015 by Naomi Stein

Students were inspired by Chanoch Piven’s work in the creation of our Hebrew-Art project. http://www.pivenworld.com/my-dog-is-as-smelly-as-dirty-socks/book-by-hanoch-piven

Each student chose a person from real life or fantasy and described that person’s character: “my mom is funny, my friend is fast, my dog is smart, my sister is sweet, my dad is cool, my teacher is thoughtful, Batman is dark……..” In the week following Pesach break students will be representing these characteristics with items to create a portrait in art. From the students’ writing, here are some ideas to get you started….

SMART things: ruler, computer, calculator, owl, Albert Einstein, dictionary

FUNNY things: smiley face, clown, joke book, Tina Fey, book, feather

FAST things: cheetah, train, lightning, bat

PRETTY things: princes, sunset, flower, spring, summer, sun, mom

SWEET things: candy, sugar, lollipop

CRAZY things: monkey, sugar rush

LOVING things: dog, dad, puppy, friend, heart, bear

WARM things: stove, fire

HELPFUL things: tools, internet

COMFORTING things: bed, pillow

LOUD things: megaphone, whistle, fireworks

SHARP things: knife

BUSY things: squirrel, soccer ball, maid, sprinter

STRONG things: gorilla

COOL things: skateboard, sunglasses

After the Pesach break each student will create her/ his person in art class. The people in the art work will be made out of items. Therefore, we ask the help of all the 4th and 5th grades’ students and families to gather the items/ things listed above and bring them to school.
Please don’t limit yourself to materials!

Toda, Mrs. Bend and Rotem

Purim and Pesach Fun!

April 3, 2015March 29, 2015 by rmills

Lots of singing, puppet making, and dramatizing characterized our Purim experience in the second grade. The students loved the idea of “ViNahafoch Who” for Purim in which things are seen as topsy turvy since in the story of Purim, told in the Megillah of Esther, many things turn out to be the opposite of what was expected. The second graders loved singing a Purim song about this state of affairs! Additionally, another favorite was a song about all different size graggers, the noisemakers, used to blot out evil Haman’s name. The culmination of our in class Purim learning was an all school celebration which involved mask making, hamantashen baking and paper bag dramatics. We also had a chance to perform the mitzvah of Misloach Manot that we delivered to the JCC Senior Meal Site that included our own delicious hamantashen we had baked.

The Gragger Song

Decorating Purim Puppets and Gift Bags

And very quickly without losing a beat, we moved on to Passover! The second graders are very ready to be active participants in their family Seders. They can sing many parts of the Haggadah. They have very much enjoyed adding second grade pieces to the progressive Haggadah that they began making in Kindergarten with Morah Ilana. They have organized and labeled the Haggadah so they can remember in which grade they added each piece. The second graders participated in a chametz search around the classroom as they reinforced vocabulary for Hebrew prepositions of where they found the leavened bread.The second graders have worked hard to memorize their parts for a Passover play in simple Hebrew. They are excited to perform it for the kindergarten and first grade. A favorite project for Passover and usually for the second grade year is sewing a frog pillow to be used as a way to relax at the Seder since we are free people! The students were quite creative in how they decorated their frogs!

Searching Our Classroom for Chametz

Frog Pillows

First Stop: Video News

March 30, 2015March 27, 2015 by Naomi Stein

Second Grade Video News

Jewish Community Day School RI on Vimeo.

We have had a very productive couple of weeks in second grade. We’ve been producing some amazing writing, and we’ve really been working on our reading skills. We just finished up our unit on persuasive writing. As you can see below, students sent out their persuasive letters, and even practiced addressing envelopes.

We begin to study poetry throughout the whole month of April, which happens to be National Poetry Month. Below, one student plays with magnets and words to write a short poem.

Students continue to practice their word skills using computer games, word work games, and weekly spelling rule practice.

We even manage to find time to relax with a good book.

We also learned more about maps this week through reading the books “There’s a Map on my Lap” and “Mapping Penny’s World”. Students then practiced creating their own maps, and made sure to include a title, a key, and labels. Stay tuned to see how clear and detailed their maps are.

In math, we began working on mental math strategies. Part of working on mental math is learning how to articulate what you are actually doing in your brain. This is a hard skill, and one that has the potential to greatly improve a person’s mental math capacity. Feel free to practice doing mental addition at home with your kids. For example, they should be able to try 346 + 3, or even 55 +8. Some might even be up for more of a challenge.

Have a great weekend!

Tamar’s Post about our Rube Goldberg Machine

March 26, 2015 by Naomi Stein

This week in Design Lab, we finished building our Rube Goldberg machine! A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that is started by a human doing something, which sets off a chain reaction, which ends in a simple task being completed, like pouring a cup of water or dropping a block. Our’s was started by someone sling-shooting a marble, which sets off dominoes, which lifts a pulley, which sets a marble rolling on a track, which sets off more dominoes, which set off another marble, which sets off a pulley, which starts a cart rolling, which knocks down a weighted cup, which knocks down colorful towers, and also pulls a ruler, which sets off dominoes, which starts a marble rolling, which sets off a mousetrap, which causes marbles to fall into a bag, which falls, and reveals a sign that says “JCDSRI Rocks!” and is splatter painted and signed by the whole school. As that happens, someone off to the side pulls a string, which activates a confetti launcher that we made. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, when we tried it out it didn’t work. So we just set it off manually when it didn’t work. Both Lashon groups worked together, even though we were working on it separately. It took about two months to complete because we only have Design Lab for 50 minutes a week. So altogether it was worked on for an hour and 40 minutes a week. I think that it was a great way to work together and make all of our ideas work, and I think that everyone worked hard together and had fun.

A Pyramid of Passover Books for Kids

March 26, 2015 by Naomi Stein

A “get up and dance” favorite! (comes with a CD)

Visit our Pinterest site for great book selections as well as yummy Passover recipes! https://www.pinterest.com/jcdsri/passover-books-for-kids/

We love books by Tami Lehman-Wilzig , who has been a Visiting Author at JCDSRI. Her website has children activities and more. http://www.tlwkidsbooks.com/ You will enjoy the recipes in her book

JCDSRI library suggestions:

Spring!

March 25, 2015 by Naomi Stein

While many of us enjoyed playing in the snow this past winter, we are excited to welcome the season of spring!

Here are some of the signs of spring that we are looking forward to:

green grass
leaves on trees
flowers and plants
birds and butterflies
warm, sunny days
lots of rain
people outside
the ice cream truck
rainbows
fish
baby animals
insects

We began working on our spring mural.

The children painted the landscape including a grassy hill and a lake:

They created flowers, trees, birds, etc. to add to the mural:

Once they have finished making the signs of spring and we have pinned them to our mural, we will begin writing labels for the different objects to also add to our mural. We will post pictures to our blog once the mural is completed!

We have been working on counting on, which is a mental math strategy to add two numbers. The children used beads and pipe cleaners to create counting tools, and practiced starting with the larger number in an equation and counting up.

This week we read My Lucky Day. Ask your child which character actually had the lucky day, and ask them to explain the surprising conclusion of the story.

New sight words:

are
that
do

Amazing vocabulary words:

fox
piglet
lucky
scrubber
filthy
cooks

Help! There’s a Wocket in my Pocket!

March 25, 2015 by Sarah Shay-Davidson

First grade celebrated a Reading Week by reading and studying Dr. Seuss and 5 of his amazing books. We began our week with There’s a Wocket in my Pocket where students created and wrote about different creatures living in their pockets.

We also read The Lorax and used our own voices to speak for different living things in our world. When we read If I Ran the Zoo, we learned about an imaginary zoo and we made masks to create our own “First Grade Zoo” filled with many different made up animals!

On Thursday when we read Bartholomew and the Oobleck, we made oobleck in our classroom and discussed if it was a solid or a liquid. Finally, we read Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and we wrote about the different things we wanted to do and see when we get older.

The first Grade brought in their favorite stuffed animals to read to

Come in and check out our bulletin board outside our classroom. It is amazing to see how much they have progressed in their writing!

Ring in Spring

March 23, 2015 by mkranowitz

We began last week with a spring activity with our kindergarten buddies. We listened to The Lorax, by Dr. Suess, and then collaborated to create paper mache pictures of trees and flowers. Even a little snow on the ground can’t stop our spring thoughts! As always, we cherish the time spent with our special little friends.

We are deep into our next two class novels. Blown Away is a historical fiction story about the 1935 hurricane in the Florida Keys. The Magic Half is a story of Miri, a middle child caught in between two sets of twins (Hello Mrs. Davis). We are also beginning our new class read aloud, Out of My Mind, by Sharon Draper. We are practicing book talks and literature circles with the children facilitating the discussion by themselves. Different roles include discussion director, passage picker, connector and word finder.

In social studies, the third and fourth graders are working in cooperative groups to research and design a travel brochure about a city in the USA. They were assigned a region and they had to narrow down the state and city. We are learning about New York City, Denver, Cape Cod and Philadelphia just to name a few. They are conducting research using the library, Ipads and the computer lab. They will be presenting and sharing their information with their peers.

We finally finished our fourth grade picture books, the largest writing assignment of the year. The children are so excited to show off their finished work to their classmates tomorrow. We have drafted, edited, typed and illustrated these masterpieces.

Our next writing unit involves all aspects of Greek Mythology. We are reading myths and finding common traits of the heroes and the Gods. We created our very own Greek monsters which are proudly displayed on the class bulletin board. We are performing Greek myths in our upcoming readers theater and we will be working on writing our very own Greek myth in a few weeks. This is such a high interest and creative unit and the kids are enthralled!

Upcoming Events:

April 1=Field trip to Foxboro School for Holocaust Project

April 2-10=Passover Break

April 15=Conferences

April 22=Wonder guest speaker Sam Drezin

May 7th=Zimriyah

May 8th=Special visitors Day

Jodd’s Post about our Field Trip to Boston

March 20, 2015 by Naomi Stein

On Tuesday, March 17th we went to Boston. In class we’ve been learning about the Revolutionary Period, and Boston was a place with a lot of action. We learned about Faneuil Hall and got to go in as well. Faneuil Hall was amazing. All the pictures and the architecture were beautiful.

Inside Faneuil Hall- we were so lucky to have the space all to ourselves!

Then we went to the spot where the Boston Massacre happened. We learned about the history of the Boston Massacre. Some patriots were throwing stones at British troops, but the British officers fired on the crowd. Only five died of the hundreds there, but that angered the patriots a lot. Then we went to the Old South Meeting House. There, we reenacted the debate that started the Boston Tea Party.

There were two sides, the patriots and the loyalists. The loyalists thought that Boston should buy the tea in the harbor. The patriots wanted to send the tea back to England, but they had a secret plan B. In the debate there were more patriots than loyalists, so they won. They asked the captain to go back to England but he refused. So the patriots secret went into play. That night, many patriots dressed up as Indians to conceal themselves. They went on to the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver and started to dump the tea into water. They worked as quietly as they could and after they were done, cleaned all three ships. They wanted to show England that they were willing to fight for independence, but that they were civil and mature. After the debate, we looked around the exhibits and saw many cool things. They even had the tea leaves from that very night. Then, for lunch we went to Milk Street Cafe. We all had something good for lunch, from sushi to salad. To finish it off, we all had dessert. It was the best lunch on a field trip.

Our field trip to Boston was Stupendous!

At Boston Harbor, where the Tea Party took place

Tea Tasting

March 20, 2015 by Naomi Stein

We engaged our senses of taste and smell when we tasted a few different types of tea. After all our talk about the tea tax, it seemed logical to have a better understanding of tea.

Students enjoyed the experience of sipping English Breakfast Tea.

We marked locations on our world map where tea is grown. Students wondered what a tea tree looks like.

We read this primary source text and discussed what political statement was being made. — We read this primary source text and discussed what political statements were being made here.

We then kicked off our percentages unit in math by figuring out which percentage of the class preferred which tea. A student asked, “It’s like if we already know decimals and fractions, then aren’t percents are really the same thing?” (Yes, exactly! Math is beautiful like that.)