In the Te’enah class this week we began our new math program, Math in Focus. The beginning chapters are review, making sure that the children have one-to-one correspondence (are able to skillfully count and keep track of a number of objects) and can compare numbers as the same, more than or less than other numbers and objects. These are foundational concepts for later and more complicated math concepts. Math In Focus is designed to begin where first graders are developmentally (in the concrete world) and help grow their math thinking into more abstract realms. The children had fun exploring some of the math manipulatives we will be using as part of Math in Focus.
September is chock full of birthdays. This year, we are doing birthday celebrations together with second grade. This week we used our schema to write birthday wishes for two students.
Schema is what we know about something or someone. The children in the class pick out a number of things that they know about the birthday child. Typical examples of this include: the birthday child’s favorite color, activities that he/she enjoys both in and out of school and favorite foods. Each child then writes a birthday wish for the birthday child based on one of the items in the schema. For instance, a birthday wish might be: I hope you get a purple birthday cake on your birthday (for someone whose favorite color is purple). After the birthday book is complete, we invite a parent to come in and read a story to the children as part of our morning meeting. Then the birthday book is shared with the birthday child and we sing Happy Birthday.
In Fundations, our phonics program, we have been continuing our review of letter sounds and writing the lower case letters. We also did a packet from a book called Explode the Code. We have awesome beginning readers in Te’enah!
Te’enah children got a chance to try and blow the shofar yesterday. It is not as easy as it looks but pretty much everyone got at least a sound out. We learned about the four calls that a shofar makes, tekiah, teruah, shevarim and tekiah g’dolah. We have also been learning about the creation story from the torah.
We are fortunate this year to have a DeLet intern in our class from Brandeis, Allison Wessells. DeLet is a program that trains teachers for Jewish day schools.
Here is a little introduction from Hamorah Alli:
I am Morah Alli, a graduate student who is learning the ropes about teaching from Morah Joanne as part of Brandeis University’s Delet/MAT Program. Before starting this program, I graduated from Smith College and did a AVODAH: Jewish Service Corp year in Washington DC. Right now, I am enjoying the process of building a relationship with the children as we learn classroom routines, read stories, and review letters with the kids’ favorite guests: Mama Echo and Baby Echo. Yesterday, I couldn’t believe my ears as I heard more than one elicit strong, joyful blasts from the shofar!
In Writers’ Workshop the children began writing their “All About Me” books. They started with self-portraits. Over the coming weeks, they will be adding more and more details about their unique interests and abilities.