Hannah Senesh Tekes

Yahadut: Honoring Hannah Senesh at School Tekes

Second graders joined the rest of the school in honoring Hannah Senesh at a school assembly. We brought our Hebrew writing along with us to share. It is now hanging in the hallway. Ask your child what they wrote about Hannah in Hebrew. 

Israel: Introducing “Sh’vil Yisra’el”

Yaheli and Yuval visited our class and introduced us “Shvil Yisrael” the Israeli trail which runs from the north to south of Israel (kind of like Israel’s Appalachian trail). We split into groups with each group having to plan a packing list for a different area in Israel. We can’t wait to start visiting different places along the trail!

If you are interested to learn more about Israel’s National Trail, you can read about it here:

Community

On Friday we had a goodbye celebration for Aviva, as she will be joining her brother at PS58. Second graders made cards for Aviva with wishes such as “We hope you will make new friends and come visit us” and “You have been a great friend and I have liked playing with you”.

While we are sad to see Aviva go, Aviva still lives in the neighborhood and both she and her parents have expressed interest in coming back to visit during the year and in remaining connected to the community. We will of course welcome her to visit in the future, and wish her all the best.

Math

The past few weeks we have focused on addition with regrouping, now we are focusing on subtraction with regrouping. Whereas in addition we had to trade our extra ones in for a ten and carry the one to the tens column, in subtraction we have to ‘borrow’ a tens from the tens column and add it to the ones column. Second graders practiced this skill through a rhyme: More on the floor (bottom of the problem) go next door and get 10 more! We completed practice subtraction with regrouping problems in monsters, and even a mystery Pokemon character!

Give your child some mental math practice by asking them to subtract 2 or 3 digit numbers.

Social Studies

We have spent the past few weeks in social studies learning about urban, suburban, and rural communities. We read “The City Kid and The Suburb Kid” by Deb Pilutti, a story about two children, one from an urban community and one from a suburban community who have a sleepover at each other’s house. This book has a special twist- the story starts with child who lives in the city visiting the child who lives in the suburbs, and in the middle of the book you flip it over and read about the suburb child visiting the city child. We spent time comparing and contrasting urban and suburban communities, and discussed our personal connections and experiences with urban and suburban settings. We then got to choose the kind of community we liked, and created constructed pop up settings of each kind of community.

Ask your child to list some characteristics of urban and suburban communities.

Art with Iviva:

After several weeks of making masks using new skills of embroidery and beading, and more familiar skills like drawing, collage and paper cutting, students explored fall landscapes through watercolor pencils, which allow students to have the control of drawing with colored pencils, and an introduction to watercolor technique. Students are making colorful, textured work, and excel in teaching each other tips for gently applying water to a drawing, and appliquéing beads onto paper without tearing the paper. The camaraderie in both second grade groups is outstanding.