The opera is coming, the opera is coming!

The past few weeks have been busy ones, as we begin to wrap up some of our year-long projects and begin our last few units of study. As you know, when we returned from Passover we began creating our shabbat boxes, creating beautiful ritual objects to enhance your own family's shabbat practice. It was wonderful to be able to share a shabbat dinner together and celebrate the children's hard work, and I hope that your families will find many opportunities to continue to bring out the shabbat boxes and welcome shabbat together.

As we counted the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot, we worked on completing our Torah scrolls in time for the festival of Shavuot, when we celebrate the Israelites' receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Children added poles and covers, and on the day before Shavuot they read through the entire scroll with their sixth grade buddies. I have some beautiful pictures of this time together, but I'm having a hard time getting them to upload....in the meantime here's one from last year.

And, true to another Shavuot tradition, we ended our celebration with cheesecake. (Why cheesecake on Shavuot? You can read about it here.)

In Language Arts, we are working on All-About Books in our last writing workshop unit. Children are working on writing books about topics they know a lot about. We are looking at mentor texts, especially the works of Gail Gibbons, to get ideas for how to teach others what we know. We're also working on reading and writing words with consonant blends and writing lower-case letters.

In Hebrew we've been learning about the map of Israel, focusing on a few major cities and bodies of water. We've practice moving figures from place to place on a small map, and last week put together a giant floor puzzle that we could actually walk on. This work will lay the foundation for our annual "trip to Israel" during the last week of school.

In math we've been working on crystallizing our understanding of two- and three-digit numbers with a new manipulative - base-10 blocks. We've played a number of games that involve representing numbers with these blocks.

Of course, the big news in the Gan is the opera. The children created a plot for our production by brainstorming characters and a setting. We then chose a few characters to develop stories for - what does this character want more than anything in the world, and why can't s/he get it? What does s/he try to do to solve the problem? Why don't these solutions work? What finally does work? After sketching out a few story lines, we were able to agree on a truly wonderful story.

The next step has been writing and learning the songs. Again, this has been a shared process, with every child contributing ideas to teach song. Children have crafted the lyrics, or libretto, and Felicia Sloin and Morah Lainee have been churning out melodies for our songs.  I know you've already been hearing snippets of these songs, because we simply can't stop singing them. We've also begun the process of turning our classroom into a stage, as children create backdrops for the opera. Next week we will decide on parts, and begin to make a list of things we need for costumes and props. I'l send a note home mid-week with items we'll be looking to borrow.

We'll be performing the opera on Friday, June 7 in our classroom. Because the space is small, we'll do 2 seatings, the first at 8:45 and the second at a time to be determined. For anyone who can't make it Friday morning, we'll also have a dress rehearsal on Thursday afternoon, time TBD. I expect the opera to be about 15 minutes long, but I'll know more at the end of the week. Please let me know as soon as possible if none of these times work for you to be part of the audience.

Are you a confident videographer? I'm looking for a parent to take on creating a video of the opera to put on the LGA youtube channel. Please let me know if this is something you can help with. Last year's opera was filmed by Kristin Rotas, and I think it's great publicity for our school.

As you may have noticed, it's getting hot and sunny. Thank you in advance for remembering water bottles. Please consider what your child's needs might be for sun coverage. We are not able to apply sunscreen on individual children, but you may leave sunscreen for your child to apply him/herself. (Please remind your children, as we will, that sunscreen cannot be shared.) Some parents find that children do better with sunscreen sticks (and some practice at home!) rather than cream or lotion.

See you tomorrow!