Hello 1JB Families,
We can’t believe it’s already May! We also can’t believe the Post Office is officially closed. Students worked incredibly hard and should feel so proud of their post office success.
Important dates and reminders:
Friday, May 10: Special Friends/Grandparents Day
Tuesday, May 14: Asian Culture Club hosts Lower School Students
Saturday, May 11: Spring Fair
Monday, May 13: Arabic Culture Night
May 14/15: Book Fair! Click here for the full Lower School Book Fair Schedule.
Sunday, May 19: Family event celebrating Jewish American History Month, Google form
Tuesday, May 21: Black Families at Friends, in connection with the Parents Association Diversity & Inclusion Committee, are hosting our first-ever community Black Excellence Celebration.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month which seeks to raise awareness and reduce stigma around mental illness and connecting to support. This year’s theme is *Take The Moment,* normalizing the practice of taking moments to prioritize mental health care without guilt or shame.
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The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
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The 5 Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans by Dr. Aliza Pressman
Post Office
Final sales, counting our earnings, gathering mailboxes, and graphing letters sent! 1JB had a busy final week of the post office!
The end of the post office always brings up big feelings! Ask your child about how they feel about the post office being over. What memories feel special for them?
Counting our earnings!
Students worked hard on counting their total earnings from the post office. They found different ways to make a dollar, like 100 pennies, four quarters, ten dimes, etc! Ask your child about the different ways they formed a dollar.
Students were so proud when finding out their total amount. Ask your child about our total earnings!
We can’t wait to learn from the Upper School students about the organization we can donate to.
Closing Ceremony
To celebrate the closing of the Post Office 1JB had a closing ceremony! We had a closing circle where everyone shared their favorite memory and job. After our circle, students received a Postal Worker Certificate!
Following the ceremony, students received their own 1JB Post Office Memory Book! This book is filled with writing down memories, favorite jobs, class visits, and stamp sales. Ask your child about the work they have completed in their memory book.
As a reminder, all these photos and MORE are located here.
Day of Service Activity
To help prepare for the day of service, 1JB discussed what the word service means. We read Amanda Gorman’s Something, Someday, and discussed that even though the main character was discouraged from solving a problem because it was too big to fix, he decided to make a change.
We then learned about Grassroots Grocery and community fridges. To help support Friends Seminary’s Day of Service, every student decorated a bag that will be filled with donated food!
Math
This week we started our unit on time! As we read the story, A Second Is A Hiccup we thought about the different units of time.
What is something you can do in a second? Clap, jump up and down once, say a word, spin around, etc. What is something you can do in a minute? Write a short sentence, sing a short song, and so on! We worked our way up to thinking about things that take an hour. Ask your child about these units of time.
How can you support your student’s understanding of time? Practice timing different activities (like brushing teeth or getting dressed in the morning) or talk about time daily with questions like “How long do you think it will take us to get from ____ to ____”.
Along with time, we have continued counting the days of school. With that, we have been making addition and subtraction equations to prove our thinking. For example: “If there have been 136 days of school, how many days till 140?” 136+4=140. Using these numbers we prove our thinking by saying that “140-136=4”.
Another element of our daily math has been using math equations to figure out how many days are left of school (sometimes these equations make us sad). This is a math problem you can do daily with your child as well!
Poetry
To continue our poetry unit students learned about personification and shape poetry. When working on personification poems students picked an animal, object, or part of nature to bring to life. What would this animal/object say? How would it describe itself?
Here is an example of one of our practice poems:
Most recently students learned about shape poetry! A Shape poem (sometimes called a concrete poem) is a poem that has a visual appearance that matches the topic of the poem. The words in the poem take the shape of a poem’s subject. To create their own shape poem students picked something that connects to one of the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, or fall).
Author Visit
Author and illustrator of Hot Dog, Doug Salati came to visit! We read aloud the amazing book with him and watched Doug sketch Hot Dog. What an exciting visit!
Art/Writing activity with Isabel
1JB had a special visit from Isabel who helped students with an exciting craft. Each student created a first-grade book to give to a Kindergartner. The books explained things that incoming first graders should know! Ask your child about what they included in their book.
