Celebrity Hangouts!

This week our 2nd and 4th grade rocketeers had the amazing opportunity to chat with Hollywood actresses, Tanya Wright and Abigail Hargrove! This was part of an Anti-Bullying Campaign organized by one of our favorite authors, Jeff Rivera. Through these chats, Tanya and Abigail shared some tips for dealing with bullying situations as well as had us share our experiences with bullying. We even got a chance to ask about acting as a job. Have a look at some clips from our chats below.

We want to send a huge thanks to Tanya and Abigail for their inspiring words! 

Show and Tell Recap

Our Show & Tell has been a hit in our REACH classes! We are pleased to see so many of our students sharing about themselves and have learned tons about favorite hobbies, special gifts received to hidden talents we did not know about our rocketeers. We even learned about cultural backgrounds and new languages! Our rocketeers have much to share and have been taking  the time to prepare these special presentations. Have a look at a recap of what we have learned this fall!




We are also excited to have our first guest speaker, Mrs. Deborah Gurt! Mrs. Gurt brought with her a Museum in a Trunk containing various artifacts of Jewish life and customs. In her presentation, we learned about immigration history and the importance of primary documents in recapturing the times and experiences from long ago. Have a look at some clips from her talk below.



If you are interested in participating in Show & Tell, have a look at our guidelines by clicking here.

Six Hats Thinking, A New Way of Thinking

The past two weeks our 2nd-4th graders have been putting on their thinking hats. We have heard our teachers tell us to do this, but what does that really mean? We discovered Edward DeBono's Thinking Hats to show us to view situations and solve problems from different points of views. Each hat is a different color, which represents a different way of viewing a situation or dilemma. The first question we explored was, "What if our parents/families decided to move to Australia?" We put on different hats and presented our findings to our classmates. Some of us even created our own mini hats to review our hats. Our next step was to use our Six Hats Thinking to explore literature. After reading the story, A Pocket for Corduroy, we then used our hats to help out the main character. Our next goal is to use our Six Hats Thinking with our novel study units. Stay tuned for more!

Here are some hats we made. 

With the black hat we list all the bad points or difficulties. 

With the white hat we list all the questions or information we need.