Sunday, October 19, 2014

What Happened in Grades 3-6 on Sunday, October 19...

Grade 3


In T'filah, Rabbi Denker told us about what Torah portion we are currently reading. This portion tells the story of Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel.


Then we did an art project to celebrate autumn. We started with making trees by blowing through straws at paint.


Then we used colored paints to make dots that look like leaves of the trees. 


Did you know that another name for the Torah is the "Tree of Life"? We just celebrated Simchat Torah, during which we rejoice in that we've completed reading the Torah and will start again new for this year. 




In Hebrew, we finished learning our first Hebrew word - BayitBayit means "house." We crated a picture of a house using the Hebrew letters that make up the word bayit.

Grade 4



Kehillah was in our classroom today because there was a program in the Social Hall. That gave us some time to hang out with our whole grade together! We spent it making Thank You cards for IDF soldiers. Two Temple Emanu El moms will be bringing the cards with them to Israel next week.



In Mrs. Abrams’ class, we made cubes of ways we can help others. Specifically, we had to think of things that we can't accomplish on our own, but towards which we can work to make a difference. 


In honor of Simchat Torah, in Mr. Stone's class, we created skits about the first few parshiot (portions) in the Torah. Guess which one we're doing in the picture above!



In Hebrew, we started by reviewing our blessings over food. We then learned a new root, which are letters that make up a word and give words similar meanings. After learning the root for "bless," we split into groups to practice our decoding.

Grade 5


Grade 5 started their day with T'filah. We talked about Simchat Torah, then the parshat Noach and how God needs our help. Also, if one person between now and next week can find the correlation between Nelsonville, Ohio and the Tower of Babble story, they’ll get a slinky or a Frisbee!


Kehillah was in our classroom today because there was a program in the Social Hall. That gave us some time to hang out with our whole grade together! We spent it making Thank You cards for IDF soldiers. Two Temple Emanu El moms will be bringing the cards with them to Israel next week.


In Mrs. Zamir's class, we kept working on parshat Noach, exploring more about what we eat and why, and how we decided what foods we should eat and which ones we shouldn't. This is because in parshat Noach, God gives the people permission to eat meat for the first time.


In Miss Silverstein’s class, we got to act out the Torah story of Joshua and the 12 Scouts. It was really fun! We learned about how spies were sent to Canaan to see if they could live there, but were met with obstacles along the way.


Miss Silverstein had set up a scavenger hunt in our room. The scavenger hunt helped us thing about the story we acted out. We didn't finish and are excited to keep work on it next week!


In Hebrew with Mrs. Zamir, we spent time in small groups. We worked on decoding practice words with Mrs. Zamir...


... and flashcards with Sam, one of our madrichot. We're excited to be warming up our Hebrew skills after our long break!

Grade 6



The sixth graders and their parents began the morning getting to know each other. They played a Jewish version of the memory game, along with fun questions in order to learn more about each other. It’s important for the student’s parents to have good relationships with one so they can support and help each other through the B’nai Mitzvah process. 






Everyone split up into groups and looked at pieces of text from the Mishnah. We talked about the important parts of Jewish text, and what to pay attention to while studying Jewish text, like who wrote it and background information. The text that we focused on was Pirkei Avot 5:21. One group discussed how society has changed from when the Torah was written and the text we study has not been modified to fit our modernized society. For example, this piece from the Mishnah sets a marriage age at 18, while nowadays many believe that 18 is too young to get married. 



We then split up into smaller groups to look at commentary about the text we studied.  



At the end of the program, Parents helped to display the Torah fully unraveled around the Social Hall. The students were able to see the Torah in its entirety and see different patterns in the text. The sixth graders also received their Torah portion materials for their B’nai Mitzvah ceremonies and were able to find their own portion on the Torah scroll. 





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