Next Shabbat, August 31st, we welcome the new Hebrew month of Elul. This month, the last Hebrew month of the calendar, is a time for self reflection and goal setting as we prepare to enter into the high holiday season. It is a custom to recite the Psalm 27 (text below), which emphasizes the themes of redemption, renewal, atonement and return. This song, which uses text from this psalm, focuses on the request of living in the house of God for all of our days. I ask you- what does the mean? What does a life living in God’s house look like? Enjoy the music:

 

Today we learned about Parshat Shemini, which gives detailed explanations on how to tell if an animal is or is not kosher. Check out these videos the 1st and 2nd graders made to share their learning. Below is one of my favorite Godcasts and also teaches this same information.

 

We have been having a blast over the past few weeks in kindergarten.

We learned about Avraham’s journey and got to take a Journey of our own around school. I didn’t tell the kids where we were going or why we were going on a Journey, but they still came with me! We compared this to Avraham’s journey, when God told him “Lech Lecha” Get up and Go. God didn’t tell Avraham where he was going, but Avraham left his home and everything he knew and listened to God, showing his belief and trust in God. Make sure to check out our Journeys Bulletin Board in Gev. Kleiman’s room.

 

Last week we helped the school bring in the new Jewish month of Adar by wearing our crowns and parading around the school singing songs. Check out our video!

This week we spent a lot of time learning about the story of Purim and writing it in our own words. Our Megillah will be up in the hallway next week! Here are some of our favorite Purim songs we are learning:

The first graders have been CRUISING through their Ariot books, and over these passed two weeks, we have learned the letters Lamed and Mem (as well as final Mem).

This week, we began to learn about the Story of Purim as written in Megillat Esther.

Remember, your kids can login to italam.org at home and practice both their Hebrew and their Jewish studies skills!

The 2nd graders finally got to invite guests into their kibbutz last week and are excited to invite Junior and Senior kindergarten this coming Monday. The 1st graders came to visit as the 2nd graders rantheir kibbutz stations, including the Children’s house, Laundry, Dish Washing, Farm and Food making.

Dear Parents,

We are doing an AWESOME Kibbutz project and need the following materials to begin building our Kibbutz on Monday. If you have anything you can donate, we would GREATLY appreciate it 🙂 Also, be sure to ask your child about this project and what job he or she has at our Kibbutz 🙂

Cardboard

2 Medium sized Boxes that could be used as pretend laundry machines

Felt

Clothes pins

4 Buckets

8 Plastic plates/platters

Towels

sponges

 

Thank you in advance!

Gev. Kleiman

In honor of Tu Bishevat, 1st grade has spiraled our learning back to thinking about composting again. AT the beginning of the year, we learned the foundations- what is composting? Why do we do it? How do we do it? And of course, we learned about the worms and their poop- because how can we know about composting if we don’t know about worm poop (If your child didn’t say this part to you 100x, consider yourself one of the lucky ones).

 

But now, we are taking this learning a step up. Now that we have been composting for a while, we wanted to know how we are doing! How did we do that you ask? The kids sorted through garbage- yes, it was gross and messy.

 

We took a garbage back from both Lower School and Upper school lunch. One at time, we weighed the garbage back, dumped it out on tarp, sorted through it, putting garbage back into the garbage and compo stable items into the compost bin. Then we reweighed the bag after. From this math, we were able to find out how much composting we Weren’t doing that we could!  Our research taught us that we aren’t composting about half of what we could be. We hope to continue this research once a month to help MJDS do better with composting, in turn, helping save our world!

 

HAPPY TU BiSHEVAT!

So much fun spending our learning time thinking about, wondering about, looking at and exploring the world of TREES. The students spent time creating trees out of as many materials as possible: blocks, legos, unifix cubes, paper, paint, buttons, etc… We used a lot of our Hebrew color vocab words to help us describe the trees in Hebrew. We also did some color sorting to help us review our colors in Hebrew.

 

We practiced singing this Tu Bishevat Song: