Growing Crystals, and Charades!

Hebrew Charades

Every week in Hebrew we practice reading new vocabulary words from the board together. After, we reinforce the meaning of the words with a game of charades, before recording the words in our notebooks. In the pictures below you can see students acting out vocabulary words that start with the letter Shin. Try to guess what the students are acting out, or play a fun game of charades at home over Shabbat!

Shin is for Shabbat

We learned the letter Shin, the first letter of the word Shabbat. We talked and wrote about what we do in Kabbalat Shabbat in class as well as on Shabbat at home.

Zelig Reading his Shin Page from Hannah Senesh on Vimeo.

Reading

In reading this week we read the book No Monkeys, No Chocolate by Melissa Stewart and Allen Young, a book that teaches us about the cycle of how cocoa beans grow in the rain forest and all the animals that are involved in helping this process along. Learning these facts will help us prepare for our upcoming field trip to Cacao Prieto, where we will learn the way chocolate is made in a factory right in Brooklyn! We also read The Recess Queen by Alexis O’neill, a story about a girl who has no one to play with at recess until a new girl joins the class. Together they help each other make friends, include others in their games, and use their recess time to play. We made a list of ways we can help each other have a good recess, and after recess talked about what we did to help each other. Students shared that they “tried to have better sportsmanship”, “played with new friends”, and “invited people who had no one to play with”. We continue to have these important discussions so that as a community we help each other make recess a time for play and fun!

Math

In math we learned how to draw bar models for addition problems, subtraction problems, and problems comparing sets. We practiced figuring out when a problem is an addition problem (solving for the whole) versus a subtraction problem (solving for a part). We read many word problems to learn keywords that help us figure out how to solve the problem, and even made up our own word problems for classmates to solve. We ended the week by reviewing concepts we have learned this year, like number patterns, greater than and less than symbols, addition and subtraction with regrouping, and expanded form.

Next week, we will start learning multiplication. Draw some pictures of equal groups and have your child count the number of groups, the number in each group, and figure out how many drawings in all!

Science

This was a big week for science experiments as we continued to explore the effect of mixing a liquid and solid. We put raisins in ginger ale to see if they would dance from the carbon dioxide, but we did not observe much movement. Rice was more successful in rising to the top. The next day, we tried again with seltzer water and there was some raisin jiggling! We made an “exploding balloon” by mixing together a liquid (vinegar) and a solid (baking soda) which inflated a balloon attached to a bottle. Due to popular demand, our lesson on salt evaporation included making crystals. We dissolved Epsom salt in bubbling hot water to make a saturated salt solution, and poured it in jars with string for the crystals to grow on. Stay tuned to see what happens next week…

Art with Iviva

Excited about Hanukkah, this week, we continued making crowns for the Hanukkah play. We also used modeling clay to make our own dreidels, which we took home. While they will never fully harden, they will air dry just enough for us to try spinning them.