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For Your Calendar
Monday, Oct. 26-Thursday, Oct. 29
6th grade TEVA trip
Friday, Oct. 30
Last 3:30 dismissal of 2015
Monday, Nov. 2
EC 4 trip to Indian Rock Nature Preserve
Tuesday, Nov. 3
Parent-Teacher Conferences
No classes
Wednesday, Nov. 4
Spanish language students celebration of
Dia de los Muertos
Wednesday, Nov. 4
8:30 am Parent Association Meeting
Friday, Nov. 6
First 2:30 Dismissal
Friday, Nov. 13
Schechter Merchant Mart
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Join Our List
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Solomon Schechter Day School Offers Heartfelt Condolences to...
Gary and Debbie Katz and their daughters, Jessica (Schechter 2006) and Hana Katz (Schechter 2008), on the passing of their aunt and great-aunt,
Susan Block.
Jayne and Chet Rotter and their children, Olivia (Schechter 2015), Aaron (7th grade) and Eli (4th grade), on the passing of their uncle and great-uncle,
Leon Lonstein.
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Community Events
Saturday, Oct. 31
Beth David Synagogue
invites families from the community to a special Shabbat afternoon program featuring celebrated book illustrator Janice Hechter and the movie
Avi's Choice
.
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Tuesday, Nov. 3
7:00 pm
Meet author and West Hartford native Katie Hurley as she discusses her new book The Happy Kid Handbook: How to Raise Joyful Children
in a Stressful World.
Free and open to the community.
Click here for more information.
Saturday, Nov. 14
Emanuel Synagogue
Movie Night
Willie Wonka
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Photos
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Shabbat Shalom
Parashat Lech-Lecha
Candlelighting 5:39 pm |
October 23, 2015
10 Cheshvan 5776
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Fall Parent Teacher Conference Day
Tuesday, November 3
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| A Message from Andrea |
Counting Our Blessings
Tomorrow in synagogues across the world, we will be reading Parashat
Lech Lecha
. The parsha tells us about Abram and Sarai's journey to a new land where they become Abraham and Sarah. It also tells us about God's blessing of Abraham and his descendants. At RELISH this morning we were beautifully reminded, by both Rabbi Yitzchok Adler and by Nancy Rosen, of all the ways in which we are blessed and the evidence that "yevarechechah" (and he blessed you) happens every day.
At Schechter we are blessed...
With the privilege of learning with and from young people who enrich all of our lives;
With an unfalteringly dedicated faculty and staff;
With a strong mission that guides our every decision;
With supporters who believe in
why
we do what we do;
With families that share their children with us everyday;
With students from age two through fourteen who inspire us;
With a faculty who are learning and growing;
With a beautiful building full of light;
With music, song, and art;
With the ability to reflect and share our lives; and
By being part of a Jewish community that believes and invests in us.
Shabbat Shalom,
Andrea
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Reader's & Writer's Workshop with Cynthia Merrill
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On Monday night, parents of students in Early Childhood 4, the lower  school, and middle school gathered in the Beit Tefilah to learn all about the Reader's and Writer's Workshop, a new model at Schechter for teaching Language Arts. Cynthia Merrill, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and a Balanced Literacy Consultant, has been coaching Language Arts teachers at Schechter since June. She addressed a room full of captivated parents on ways to support their children as readers, writers, and thinkers.
 The workshop approach is a model that supports teachers in differentiated instruction and allows students to move forward in reading and writing at an individualized pace. Students also have choice in the selection of books they read and the topics about which they write. Class begins with a short focus lesson from which all students benefit. In reading, topics for the lesson might be identifying main ideas or drawing inferences; in writing, it might be writing a lead to a story or adding details to enhance a reader's experience. Then students have the opportunity to read or write on their own, with partners and in groups. The reading and writing blocks culminate each day with a sharing time in which students come back together to share their successes and challenges with one another.
Teachers have worked this fall on assessing all students with the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmarking program. This formative, research based evaluation assesses student's rate of fluency, accuracy, and comprehension level. Multiple times a week, students receive instruction in small, flexible groupings - groups can be changed easily, quickly and for a variety of reasons. They also participate in 1:1 conferences with teachers on a regular basis to help teachers identify what skills would be most helpful for the students to learn.
Cynthia shared a few nuggets of wisdom with the crowd. She offered that the most important thing that parents can do for children is participate in shared reading times, long after their child is in first grade. Having adults model their own love of reading and the way in which they think about what they read, keeps children engaged. Cynthia spoke of reading as a social experience. She encouraged parents to ask children to think about their reading and answer deep questions about connection, not just surface level comprehension questions.
Check our
Facebook page
to see the authors with whom Cynthia suggested you might fall in love.
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| Creative Juices Flow After School |
On Tuesday afternoons, Schechter students have the opportunity to work in the most recent creative place, the
Makerspace
. This room is chock full of materials that allow a student's imagination to soar. The Makerspace is filled with diverse materials from lo-tech to hi-tech, circuit boards to pipe cleaners, nuts and bolts to magazines, and soon...a 3-D printer. Makerspace allows students to learn through hands-on experiences, solve problems, and create anything that their minds can think up! Makerspace, a haven for all things creative, inventive, and investigatory, is open after school to students in grades Kindergarten through Eighth grade.
At Art Afterschool on Wednesdays, you can find students discussing the  works of Seurat, Picasso, Renoir, and other great masters. In the past weeks,
students have
focused on Pointillism. They began with a brief art history lesson about Georges Seurat and the technique known as Pointillism. They explored images of his work and the class practiced sketching, color blending, and the dot and dash technique to  create their own original Pointillism work. This style takes patience and focus and the students have been very serious in their work.
Both afterschool classes are taught by Schechter's new art teacher Rhiannon van Bindsbergen. "I am so proud to facilitate these powerful and creative minds as they grow their experiences and learn." Seventh grade student . has been assisting the group for his Bar Mitzvah service project. Take a look in the Art Room, the Art Gallery in the school hallways, and the MakerSpace Workroom to see how creative Schechter students can be.
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EC 4 Create Personal Alphabet Books
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Early Childhood 4 students authored and illustrated their first alphabet  book. In this two-month long project, students explored the alphabet by first looking at the letters in their own names. They learned that letters are so important because they not only spell their names and the names of all their friends in the class, but also spell so many wonderful words. Students used picture dictionaries as a resource in creating this book as well as exploring many letter games during this project. "Collaborative projects like these validate each child's ideas and artistic expression. It also unites the class as a community in working toward a common goal," said teacher Michelle Fontaine.
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| Second Graders Visit Hebrew Home |
 One of the highlights of second grade
is the
monthly visit students make to the Hebrew Home and Hospital (HHH) in West Hartford. This past week,
students made their first visit to HHH which
began with a tour of the facility. Students then met with residents and together they created an art project related to the fall season, listened to a story read by Ruthan Wein, Director
of  Volunteer Resource, and enjoyed a snack. To finish the visit, the students put on a short performance for the residents.
This special program helps Schechter
students to fulfill the
mitzvah of respecting the eld
erly an
d also demonstrates a core value of  the school's mission -
lev tov, a good heart.
Second grader Charlie Levin said, "I am excited with my new friend at the HHH."
Sarah
, a resident who has participated in the program in before said, "It is always good to see the children."
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| A New Sound...Schechter Singing Scorpions! |
 Heshvan is here. What better time of year to brighten up an otherwise sad month than with the sounds of music, by starting up the new school choir, the
מַקְהֵלַת אַקְרָבֵי שֶׁכְטֵר
Schechter Singing Scorpions.
The choir is open to all Schechter students in grades 3-8. The choir will sing for events at school and in the community singing songs in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Ladino, Israeli songs, Jewish-American songs, holiday songs, and more. No auditions are required to participate. Come and join Mr. D. on Thursday mornings from 7:45-8:25 am in the music room. The first rehearsal will be on Thursday, October 22, and the very first performance outside of school will be at the West Hartford Holiday Stroll on Thursday, December 3. To sign-up for the Schechter Singing Scorpions, please contact Mr. D. at [email protected]
. Reb Nachman said, "Even if you can't sing well, sing. Sing to yourself. Sing in the privacy of your own home. But sing." There's strength in numbers, so don't just be a singer at home. Come and join us as we bring music and joy to ourselves and others.
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Susan Kurtis, Editor
Lara Lakenbach and Audrey Sobel-Pressman, Asst. Editors
Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Hartford |
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