First Grade: Preparing Ourselves for the High Holidays - Words and Actions Matter!

By Anonymous
Preparing Ourselves for the High Holidays: 
One Word and Action at a Time!


I recently read this: 
Words matter. They are packages of power that can harm or help...

And so my work with the First Grade Students began with reading our first two TREASURES of the year - Gershon's Monster and Mr. Peabody's Apples. 



Many of the social justice TREASURES read and discussed this year will be anchored in a particular Jewish text, mitzvah or Jewish value. I introduced the Ecclesiastes text below to lay the groundwork for reading and delving deep into the big messages of these two stories:




Gershon's Monster retold by Eric Kimmel Smith


What happens when a young man named Gershon sweeps his mistakes into his cellar every week, empties his mistakes in the sea every Rosh Hashanah and never says sorry or thinks twice about his words or actions? His mistakes catch up with him in a serious way!!!  

            Ask your child to share what were some of Gershon's mistakes? (students pulled out his mistakes from a large garbage bag)

 And what happened with Gershon and his wife that FINALLY got him to pay attention to what he was saying and doing and become 
a better person?




Mr. Peabody's Apples by Madonna

 What happens when a young boy, Tommy Tittlebottom, THINKS/BELIEVES he saw Mr. Peabody, teacher and baseball coach, take an apple from Mr. Funkadeli's Fruit Market without paying for it? He tells his friends about it - who in turn tell their parents - who then tell their neighbors - who in turn tell their friends. 


We "tracked" the Domino Effect of Tommy's "rumor" that he shared with his friends about Mr. Peabody and saw how the power of his words was passed from one group of people to another and the damage it caused to Mr. Peabody and how people thought about him.
Ask your child to tell you WHAT REALLY HAPPENED at Mr. Funkadeli's Fruit Market.

 And find out how Mr. Peabody was able to help Tommy understand the power of his words.













Each first grade class brainstormed a list of words connected to kindness that have a lot of power. 

Then students wrote their words from the list artistically and creatively on white paper pieces.








       





These words were then arranged and glued by students on black foam board 
as a collection of words from the first grade!






























List of kindness words from each class...








Their finished Masterpiece of Words...


One first grade student commented - after hearing that this Word Board would be hung in the first/second grade hallway - "we can all stop by and look at the words and think about which words we would like to use that day..."

Popular posts from this blog

The Last Week of the First Month of the New Year

By
Image
January 27-31, 2020 This week the first graders were readers, listeners, writers, respectful audience members mathematicians, agents for change, and artists. Read on to learn more about some of the highlights from the past week!  Language Arts: This week during FUNdations blocks we learned the trick words what,   when , who, where, there and here and we added a new word of the day "ducks" and talked about its multiple meanings. We also read in small guided reading groups and did center work that included the suffix "s", and creating short stories from Story Cards. During writing, the first graders added transition words and supply lists to their "how-to" books.  Ask your first grader: Which four transition words did you add and why do we add transition words to our writing?  Math: This week in math the first graders spent more time with fractions, specifically 1/2 and 1/4, understanding what they represent and how to wr...
Read more

First Grade - Mr. Peabody's Apples: A Lesson about Gossip

By Anonymous
Image
First Grade Social Justice - Mr. Peabody's Apples:  A Story about Gossip and the Power of our Words by Stephanie Rotsky L eading up to Yom Kippur, the first graders heard the story Mr. Peabody's Apples. Before reading the book, we looked at a timeline of ten days that stretches between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - sometimes referred to as the Days of Awe - and we talked about how we have an opportunity during these days to make a plan to be our best selves for the coming year. Mr. Peabody's Apples was introduced as a story where one child's words about another person caused great harm to that person. We introduced the concept of gossip and how our words have great power to make someone happy or hurt them. T he story of Mr. Peabody's Apples focuses on a boy, Tommy Tittlebottom, who regular sees Mr. Peabody, teacher and little league coach, go into a fruit market on Saturdays after each game and take an apple and THINKS he never pays...
Read more

Spotlight on the Middle School Fall Play

By
Image
The Middle School After School Drama Elective will be presenting "The Trumpet of the Swan" in November and the students are hard at work staging, designing, creating and learning many theater skills that can be used during the performance process.  The following information has been submitted by our Grade 8 Student Officers who are members of the International Thespian Society (ITS) in the Rashi Middle School Theater Program.  As we get ready for our Fall show, we’d like to share a little bit about how we’ve been preparing for it in the tech booth. The lighting system is mostly up and running again as it was taken down at the end of last year for lighting maintenance. We’ve been working to arrange it in a way that is comfortable for the technicians in the Tech Booth to be able to program the lights for the show. We’ve also been gathering and designing the sound cues, and we’re getting ready to program them into the soundboard.  Ari I - ITS President - Class of '24 In the ...
Read more