Settling in and upcoming events

Shalom families! As your wonderful children continue to settle in and get used to our new space, I continue to be amazed at their resilience and ability to adapt to new things. Kol Ha’kavod!

Our day-to-day schedule has changed slightly, please see our ‘class schedule’ page for more info.

And now for the fun stuff!

Tomorrow (Friday) we will be having a family style Kabbalat Shabbat with Dr. Mitzmacher from 3:05 pm – 3:45 pm and we hope you can join us!

HOMEWORK ALERT!!! Monday morning, May 13th, we will be welcoming grandparents and special friends into our classroom (virtually!). We will be having a show and tell as part of our activities. Please have your child select an item to bring to class that reminds them of their grandparent(s). You can send it in tomorrow (Friday) or on Monday.

Thank you for your collaboration!

 

and now a few words from our friends in grade 3

We are so lucky here in JK to have our friend Nate (from Grade 3) come and help out every Thursday morning. This week, he brought a new friend, Mateo, and here is what they have to say about our class:

  1.  Rating of JK ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️x 100000000000000000000000000000000.
  2. JK is fun.
  3. JK is nice.
  4. JK is 😎 cool.
  5. JK is brave.
  6. When I am here I’ll play marble run and so many other things!
  7. Today was Mateo‘s first day Mateo loved it we’re gonna come back every Thursday!

Thank you so much Nate and Mateo, we can’t wait to see you next week!

Corona – not just a virus!

Happy eclipse day! This morning we explored what a total eclipse would actually look and feel like by watching a time lapse video, pausing it strategically, and talking about what we saw. Some questions that we discussed: What is happening to the shadows? Is this scary? Why/why not? Why does it look like night outside? Why can’t we look at the sun? What is the sun made of? We spent a lot of time talking about our eyes and why it is not safe to look at the sun. We even got to try out Ms Thompson’s eclipse glasses! Thank you for the cool experience, and the yummy surprise snack!

Then, we created our own corona art work, went for a nature walk to check out all the cool shadows on campus, and had snack outdoors in the beautiful weather.

Comment below if you watched the eclipse – we are so curious!!

Have a lovely, safe afternoon!

Light

This week JK explored the element of design “light” through a scientific lens. We studied light, light sources, darkness, shadows, and learned about the upcoming eclipse on Monday. (Reminder: Monday early dismissal at noon!)

Next week, we will explore the element of “space” which includes both outer space and physical space. I will be talking to JK about the upcoming move to KBI after Pesach, and we will be discussing their thoughts and feelings, and collecting their input on what toys and games to bring with us to design our new classroom space! If you haven’t already talked to your child(ren) about the upcoming move, please consider this weekend as a great opportunity to do so. Quinn, the school social worker, will be running a workshop on transitions to help strengthen the learning environment in the classroom and to help the children prepare for the move to KBI. If you wish to opt your child out of the workshop please let me know before April 11th as this is when our workshop will take place. We will be talking about change, and playing games that focus on transition (change), as well as their favourite things in the classroom that will be coming with us.

Shabbat shalom and have a lovely weekend!

Homework Alert!

This week we are focusing on the element of design “light” – what excellent timing as we are about to experience a solar eclipse! This morning we explored light, light sources, darkness, and shadows. We also discussed how the moon revolves around planet Earth, which also revolves around the sun, and had a visual demonstration of a solar eclipse using a flashlight, a basketball, and a smaller ball. Spoiler alert: this ties into next week’s element “space”!

The homework tonight is to replicate the demonstration (please watch this video if you’d like a refresher) and have your child describe it to you. They can also bring in a flashlight or small directional lamp (such as this if you have one – please do not buy one) to have a turn explaining it to their peers.

Patterns!

This week we are taking a dive into the beautiful world of patterns! We started today with AB patterns and had a great time practicing, continuing, and inventing our own! I am very excited to see what patterns will be coming to our classroom tomorrow for “Tacky Tuesday”!

 

We also had a fabulous time parading our costumes and playing games at the Purim carnival.

innovation day!

A huge ‘kol ha’kavod’ to JK for their first innovation day! What a fun morning! Thank you to all of our guests for popping in to experiment with us!

Leading up to this morning, JK was heavily invested in learning about what makes objects sink or float. They learned about density, and even conducted an eggsperiment – no, wait, an experiment – to change the density of water so that an object that sank (an egg haha) was now able to float! Check out the booklets your children brought home in their backpacks to re-create the experiment at home! Their main challenge was to build a popsicle stick raft to get their dinosaur across the water table. As the joke goes… Why did the dinosaur cross the river? To get to the other side.

    

form – a shapey social and emotional learning journey

This week in JK, we continued to our second element of design: form. We learned that a form is a shape, which is what you get when your line connects back to itself, and no longer has a beginning and an end. We started on Monday with a review of the basic four 2-dimensional shapes, circle, triangle, square, and rectangle, and then learned their names en Français! Cercle, triangle, carré, et rectangle. We also learned the names and features of some more complex shapes: Oval (ovale), heart (coeur), star (étoile), and diamond (diamant).

Purim is coming up, so we made silly clown door decorations by folding, cutting, and stamping. We even made our own pom-pom hat toppers!

We looked at the shapes of everyone’s mouths when they were trying to express “being silly” and discovered that each mouth has a shape. We extended our learning by exploring feelings, and noticed that the whole face can change shape with different emotions. For example, your cheeks squish to the sides when you are happy and smile, making your head wider, and when you are surprised or scared and your mouth opens, it makes your face longer because your chin goes lower. We traced different ’emotions’ stencils and looked at eyes and eyebrows, and mouths and talked about what their different shapes might mean.

We read and discussed the story “How are you Peeling? Foods with Moods” by Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers, focusing on two very important things. First, the ability to look at someone’s face and decode/figure out their emotion based on the shapes of their features (eyes, eye brows, mouths…). We discovered that some emotions have similar shapes and that you can feel more than one feeling at a time, and that’s okay! Second, that the best thing to do when you are having BIG feelings (and small ones too!) is to talk about it.

We looked at photos of people in various scenarios and discussed what they might be feeling or what might be happening to them based on their facial expressions and what else is going on in the photo. It was perfect timing, as we have been having some new friendships forming, and other friends feeling left out, and we had a really good chat about that.

   

Another way that we explored the concept of form included a new gym warm up: yoga. We explored the forms our bodies can make (and some that we can’t!). Check out this Alef Bet yoga to practice at home.

We have also been experimenting and learning about our Innovation Day theme: Sink/Float. Can’t wait to share it all with you on Wednesday, March 20th from 9:00 am to 9:45 am!