Rabbi Nevins Continues Visits with 4th and 5th Grade this Week

My tour of GOA Lower School concluded this week with numerous forays into 4th and 5th grade classrooms. As expected, I found a diverse, exciting, and engaging approach to many subjects from math and science to language arts, social studies, Hebrew and Judaic Studies. I learned composition skills with Ms. Bernstein—is that idea a seed or an entire watermelon? She helped students move from general topics (summer vacation!) to fascinating details, making for more richly textured writing. 

In 4th grade math, Ms. Kagan introduced us to the “TENenbaums,” a pair of brothers who solve math problems by breaking numbers into tens and change. Up in 5^th grade, Ms. Epstein used spot-surveys to teach percentages (“What percentage of the 13 people present prefer vanilla cupcakes?”) and then launched a game of “war” to challenge students to master math facts, quickly assessing, for example, whether .085 or .37 is greater. In their Torah classes, 4th and 5th graders tilled the rich soil of the Garden of Eden with Morah Tzipi and Morah Lisa, pondering deep questions such as why humanity was created last, according to Genesis 1 (and what became of the snake’s legs?) Our students understood the fluent Hebrew spoken by their teachers and frequently responded with their own sharp questions and insights. An especially fun end of week activity with Ms. Gorman and Morah Shari was a game of Jeopardy! in which two teams of students competed closely across fields such as grammar, social studies, and science, reviewing what they had recently studied (I was honored to be featured in one of the questions.) Finally, Morah Chaya gathered her students in a circle for Kabbalat Shabbat, singing the words of Kiddush with the students, serving them juice and challah, and helping us all prepare for a Shabbat shalom.