Pajama Night Goes Zumbini!

The final Pajama Night of the Mercaz Academy school year was another fun opportunity for children aged two to four to put on their pajamas and brighten the nightlife in Plainview by checking out Mercaz Academy after dark. Incoming and prospective families joined Mercaz Early Childhood Center students for a child-friendly dinner and evening of activity at Mercaz Academy after dark.

Sixth Graders Show Promise at CIJE VEX Tournament

Mercaz Academy sixth graders recently returned to compete in the CIJE VEX Robotics Tournament, facing off against 140 teams from middle schools all over the United States, split into two divisions.

With robots carefully boxed for transport, Mercaz students were excited to arrive at The Armory in Washington Heights, the site of the tournament. The competition floor buzzed with activity as the teams moved from table to table for one-minute collaborations with randomly assigned teams to try to score the most points with their robots.

Kitah Gimel Writes About Pesach By the Numbers

Students in Kitah Gimel are following in the footsteps of the rabbis of the Haggadah and discussing Pesach by the numbers. What is the significance of the number one to Pesach? Well, one student suggested that there’s only one afikoman. What makes number two relevant? There are two sedarim, another student offered, and three matzot immediately came up. Four caused ideas to flow thick and fast, and students were able to keep going through number ten–although outliers like 15, 70, and 210 made it into the conversation.

Kitah Gimel students then used their Ivrit writing skills to list one or more of their favorite numbers, writing sentences in Hebrew to explain exactly how the number was represented in the Pesach celebration (of course, the number four generated many sentences all by itself). These numerical analyses of the holiday are now on display, inspiring students all over the school to add a little more math to their Pesach preparations.

Playground Physics: A Kindergarten Science Lesson

Kindergarteners turned the Early Childhood playground into a learning lab in a recent science lesson with Mrs. Maliner. The class was surprised and delighted when Mrs. Maliner led them outside, where they gathered around the swing set. Pushing on the swing, she explained how force causes movement, and demonstrated how pushing makes the object move farther away, while pulling makes it come closer. 

Students already knew that they could swing without someone to push or pull them, so Mrs. Maliner suggested that they get on the swing and figure out what force was doing the pushing and pulling to send them back and forth. They pumped their legs, realizing that the forward motion of their feet was like a push, while bringing them back was more like a pull. Mrs. Maliner explained that force is movement, and the students realized that more movement made them go higher. As they pumped their legs, they created continuous forces, pushing forward at the peak of the swing and pulling backward at the bottom, adding energy to the system each time. The children observed that bigger pushes and pulls created faster movement and higher swings, while stopping their leg movements allowed other forces like gravity and friction to gradually slow them down. 

By observing their own play, students gained understanding of the fundamental concept that forces change how objects move, speed up, slow down, or change direction–and the great time on the swings made for a truly memorable physics lesson.

First Graders Enter the World of Literary Criticism

The first grade class has been busily mastering different forms of nonfiction writing all year. They have already written short essays on small but memorable moments in their lives, as well as authoring how-to books in their areas of expertise. Now, as experienced writers, they have reached an exciting milestone: reviewing the work of others.

For their first venture, each student selected a favorite book to review, determining the genre, thoughtfully highlighting the specific elements they enjoyed and concluding with their enthusiastic five-star recommendations. The young critics took their jobs as literary critics quite seriously, and demonstrated their growing ability to express opinions and support them with details from their chosen stories. Mrs. Reinhardt reports that this successful project is just the beginning, as the budding reviewers will be evaluating various other subjects in the coming weeks, further developing their critical thinking and writing abilities.

Searching for Greens (and Chametz) in the GrowTorah Garden

This week in the GrowTorah garden, students remembered last week’s discussion about the fact that Pesach is also known as Chag HaAviv, the “Holiday of Spring.”  Farmer Menuchah suggested that Karpas—the step in the Pesach Seder in which we dip a spring vegetable, like parsley, into salt water—shows Hashem we’re celebrating Pesach in the spring as intended, since parsley grows in this season. Before planting parsley seeds, students seized the opportunity to taste them, and were surprised to discover that they taste like carrots. They learned that plants have families, just like people, and that both parsley and carrots are members of the Apiaceae family. 

Some classes participated in a Bedikat Chametz (Search for Leaven) Scavenger Hunt, where they searched for and found chametz hidden in the garden beds. Each hidden packet of chametz contained a Pesach-themed clue, which led them all around the garden (“It’s a sage idea to clean before Pesach,” for example, called on students to identify a sage plant in order to find the next clue). Along the way, students planted seeds, observed plant growth, and tasted chives–another idea for a spring vegetable to use for Karpas.