Our high schoolers have been able to reconnect with residents of The Medallion over the last few weeks. Thanks to a generous grant called Better to Serve, our students are creating meaningful relationships with Jewish Senior citizens while doing fun activities!

On Tuesday we were thrilled to host the first Lag Ba'Omer Unity Concert sponsored by Chabad Outreach, bringing together 4 Jewish Day schools for an afternoon of ruach, celebration, and fun! Students enjoyed singing and dancing along with recording artist Mendy Worch, popsicles, and a raffle!

Congratulations to Head of School Rabbi Jordan Silvestri for having his article titled "An Age-Adjusted Program for Tefillah Education" published in the Lookstein Center's Jewish Educational Leadership Journal themed around cultivating Jewish spirituality. Click here to read the captivating write-up.

This week third graders in Mr. Simon's class learned how to research a specific topic, verify the mined data and present their findings. Several groups working through the week researched the Prime Minister of Israel and compared that data to the President of the USA. They looked at how each is elected, their roles and responsibilities and specifically who they are in each country.

Morah Aviva's ECE4 is so excited to have completed their Alphabet this week with letter “Zz” for zebra pattern! Everyone also made special Medurot- bonfire projects using Q-tips, glue, and their fingers to paint squiggly and wavy lines to replicate flames in honor of Lag Ba'Omer. After, each child attempted to write the Hebrew word - Medura on their paper. The class also begun to work on fun number books reviewing the numbers 1-20. This book allows for the utilization of several skills which include tracing, beginning writing skills, counting, number recognition, and peeling stickers which is an excellent fine motor activity.

Students in Morah Ester's 4th grade Judaic Studies class have been learning about Yosef becoming the 2nd person in command in Egypt, and how his father Yaakov sent his sons to bring food back. Yaakov told his sons "go down there", the numeric value of the Hebrew word is 210. This is a hint that for 210 years the Jewish people's offspring would be in Egypt as slaves. The 4th grade students added to this explanation, rearranging the Hebrew words, changing רדו (go down) to דור (generation) and rearranged שמה (there) to משה (Moses), in this way too Yaakov is hinting that until Moshe's generation they are going to be slaves, and Moshe will be the one to free them from slavery.

Pop art in 2nd grade is jumping off the page! Students have been having fun in their mini unit on pop art. The project focused on comic book art words that pop out of the page. They had a lot of creative fun interpreting words and their sounds in these playful collages.

This week in STEAM students in Ms. Adriana's class continued learning and playing with dinosaurs! They continued their excavations of dinosaur bones then pieced them together, making dinosaur footprints, learning the names and traits and asking lots of really wonderful questions about dinosaurs and the time in which they lived!

This week students in Morah Clara's ECE3B class completed their Lag Ba'Omer learning. They worked on their fine motor skills coloring, cutting and gluing a bow and arrow as they learned about Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. They also traced their own hands to build fire for the bonfire, and pretended to cook smores. The class also celebrated the completion of their ABC learning with letter Z, and on Friday the class will bake a zebra cake and decorate it with ABC candy.