Spotlight

Morah Cohen's second grade students are constantly growing their knowledge! In order to better understand the words they come across in Chumash, the girls have been making fun and colorful shorashim (root word) cards. By decorating their own cards they can better remember the meanings of the words and flex their creativity in the process!

In Mrs. Castle's science class, the middle school has been delving into the Human Body. This week, the seventh grade boys learned all about the body's largest organ, the skin. In a fascinating lab they tested the sensitivity of their own skin to various stimuli and saw what areas of their skin are more sensitive than others.

In honor of Parshas Vayeira, our Kindergarten students welcomed special guests to TDSA. Parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and siblings came to TDSA to complete fun projects, sing songs, and learn some Torah. The Kitah K students were excellent hosts. They made sure their guests were comfortable, gave them food to eat, made them gifts and even shared a goody bag with their guests that they could take home. All the guests felt so welcomed and had a wonderful time!

Mrs. Bram's 5th grade students are finishing up a unit on Pre-Colonial America. As a capstone project for the unit, the 5th grade boys are constructing models of Native American dwellings. The boys based their dwellings on the content they learned and incorporated elements of their chosen tribe's lifestyle and culture. These impressive and detailed models are an immersive and hands-on way to review and solidify the students' knowledge of pre-colonial America.

Ms. Turner's fourth grade students are deepening their reading comprehension skills. They learned how to decode the plot of a story by comparing it to a mountain. Using this visual metaphor the students used highlighters to identify the different steps in short story plots.

Pumpkins are fascinating fall fruit and Morah Mindy's Kindergarten students can tell you all about them! The students explored all there is to know about pumpkins. They learned about the life-cycle of a pumpkin, the properties of pumpkins, took a virtual tour of Libby's Canned Pumpkin factory, tasted pumpkin (muffins) and even cut open a pumpkin and counted the seeds (there were more than 700!). It turns out pumpkins are tasty, fascinating and fun to learn about!

Mrs. Bolnick's third grade class has transformed into an interactive learning environment using non-vertical surface boards. These removable whiteboards can be used on the walls, on the floors and even spread across desks. The students love moving around the classroom and working in pairs or teams to solve language arts or math problems. It's really expanded the learning space and the students are able to move, think and talk together while practicing hands-on mathematics and language arts skills.

The boys in the robotics enrichment cohort completed a challenge to gain an understanding of rotary motion. The students discovered that using gears of various sizes impacts the amount of weight a lever is able to lift. Over the next few weeks the boys will use the problem solving skills gained from this and other exercises to brainstorm their own coding and robotics passion projects.

Mrs. Rabinowitz's library class took a deep dive into various types of literature focusing on being sick. It's that time of year when students have to be careful about sharing germs and start missing school because they're sick. The students were enthralled by the book "A Bad Case of Stripes" by David Shannon and chuckled through the poem, "Sick" by Shel Silverstein. After discussing the reading selections the students were able to choose from a number of "Sick Day" activities- like making paper-bag puppet doctors and Sick Day word-searches to reinforce this week's theme!

In STEAM class this week, Kindergarten focused on why we can only see stars at night. By constructing their own star projectors they were able to see how the absence or presence of light makes stars more or less visible. In addition to helping answer a pressing scientific question for our students, the star projectors were also mesmerizing and fun to make.