2D Art Work

Sharing an English and Hebrew classroom means a little less room for beautiful displays. Therefore I will show you some of 1Cs work via the blog! Here are a few of the students' beautiful tangram-animals...

Sharing an English and Hebrew classroom means a little less room for beautiful displays. Therefore I will show you some of 1Cs work via the blog!

Here are a few of the students' beautiful tangram-animals which they completed with their Grade 7 buddies, following a reading of a Chinese story "Grandfather Tang".

Here are some pictures of the students' 2D shape worlds! 

2D Fun!

The past couple of weeks has been a busy time for us in Grade One as the pace of the program has picked up in many ways. Each Grade One student continues to amaze me as he/she rises to each and every...

The past couple of weeks has been a busy time for us in Grade One as the pace of the program has picked up in many ways. Each Grade One student continues to amaze me as he/she rises to each and every challenge I pose. In Math, our focus has been twofold: the students have become experts at employing mental math strategies to compute addition problems; using doubles and near doubles, bridging to 10, using 10 as a base, using 9 (Mr. 9) as a base and using the 'partners that make 10' to add quickly. The second focus in Math has been on 2D and 3D Geometry concepts. We've explored the attributes of 2D figures and have just begun to explore 3D solids as a way of fine-tuning the students' spatial awareness and their understanding of shape and space in our environment. Subtraction is next. 

The pictures below show some of the fun 1C have been having with 2D figures! 

Chrysanthemum Teaches us a Lesson

As our Colourful Characters Literature unit begins drawing to a close, we explored the famous story, Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes which of course contains a very important moral.  The Grade...

As our Colourful Characters Literature unit begins drawing to a close, we explored the famous story, Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes which of course contains a very important moral. 

The Grade Ones came to learn, through the messages implicit within the story, that we should "treat others the way we want to be treated." Not only is this a fundamentally Jewish concept (וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ) but it reminds us all to take stock and do our best to operate from a place of kindness, compassion and respect. During our reading of Chrysanthemum, I passed around a large paper heart. Each time a character in the book made fun of Chrysanthemum and teased her about her name, one of the Grade Ones was asked to crumple the heart and each time a character in the book demonstrated kindness or compassion, the Grade Ones were asked to smooth out the heart. By the end of the story, the heart, although not fully crumpled and in better shape than it was during the story, contained wrinkles that could not be entirely removed. Similarly, mean words cannot be taken back and often leave a scar on one's heart. The students understood the connection that our own hearts feel wrinkled and crumpled sometimes when we don't like what someone says. Words do hurt. We then tried to put bandaids on the heart as a way to show that we can own our mistakes and apologize.  The heart will probably still be wrinkled, but it is healing. Following this meaningful activity, each student created two friends on which they wrote two responses. On one friend they wrote what Chrystanthemum taught them and on the other friend they wrote an intention to do good for their friends.