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27 Oct 2017

What a Week!

Hello 5th Grade Community!

We are very excited to share our updates with you. Our students engaged in engaging and rigorous academic work, and started Mindfulness during Advisory periods this week. We hope this curriculum helps our students become more mindful, reflective, and relaxed as the year progresses. We hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

HUMANITIES: In Reading, our students continued to read Wonder, and explored what it means to have different narrators across  a text. In Writing, students began researching for their Research-Based Argument Essays, exploring issues such as LGBTQ rights, police-civilian relationships, and the effects of climate change on our planet. Finally, in Social Studies, students learned about Hinduism, its core philosophies, and its deities this week. I hope everyone has a peaceful and relaxing weekend-Tony

MATH: The fifth graders started unit two on calculations with whole numbers this week. We developed skills of calculations with parentheses, distributive property, and methods for mental calculation. We are looking forward to applying our calculations in real world problems and multiplication by a 2-digit whole numbers next week. Math Help is available Wednesday after school (4-5pm) in room 207.-Kelly

JUDAICS:
Yakira:
“This week we learned about Yakov and how first his parents picked favorites and then he did to. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. It actually never said specifically that Yakov was upset about his parents taking favorites, maybe that’s what he thought it was just what being a “good parent”looked like. We’re also learning that Joseph’s brothers didn’t like him because Yakov (not caring what would happen) gave Joseph a striped coat (that we assume colorful). The brothers saw this and of course they got jealous of him and even hated him! The Torah even says that they couldn’t even talk to him. We’re learning about prefixes, suffixes and breaking words down to find the root. We got study pages to learn for a future test.  We’re learning more and more everyday and I can’t wait to learn more!”

Eben:

“This week the fifth grade got their first reward for having a full week of being 100% ready and done the “Do Now” at the start of class. The way it works is if all week the class is ready on time the following Monday we get recess the last 10 minutes. We continued working on our Joseph Chumash packets and translating words by looking closely at their prefixes and suffixes. We looked at the question “How does our past affect our future” and how that connects to Jacob’s life and the themes that continue from his childhood to Joseph’s childhood.  On google classroom we learned about Jacob’s life and how he shows favoritism towards his son Joseph. Friday we had trope Friday and studied trope by practicing the notes on the text we have been studying from Bereshit.. Thank you Laura.”

HEBREW: This week the middle school started a proficiency based online assessment. 
We use this assessment twice a year (beginning & end) and look into all four skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. As this is a proficiency based test, there is no need to prepare for it.There are two main goals for this test. The first is for the school to assess students progress through the year as well as across the grades.The second is to see patterns of progress which will help adapt our curriculum and instruction as needed.The results of this assessment ranked according to ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) standards . The test does not effect student’s grade and is not factored into this semesters grade. Shabbat Shalom-Yehuda & Ilana
SCIENCE: Students this week in science finished their parachute experiment following the scientific method. They gathered the data from last week and created a graph of all the students’ parachute drop time. These results then were applied to their hypothesis in order for it to be supported or not supported. Then students made conclusions about the experiment. Once this reported was completed they gained knowledge in order improve their parachute design. They started construction on parachute version two. This second experiment will continue next week, with plenty of students excited to discovery the results.-Mike

Advisory (Special Note): 

Dear parents,
We are excited to let you know that this week we started a mindfulness program in advisory. The program is comprised of once a week meetings.
The Program Goals:
  • Provide students with the tools to create a space between stimulus and response and manage high school process more effectively.
  • Help students to distinguish between reality and their own thoughts and foster an ability to observe and label their own thoughts without judgment.
  • Discover roots of mindfulness within Jewish Text and Values
  • Cultivate caring community members
  • Create a time and space of quiet reflection.
We hope the children will benefit from the program and it will provide them with meaningful life skills!
–Andreea


 

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