Open snack time: helping my students pick fresh fruit over the empty calorie snack

As a parent, I am often left frustrated when the snacks I send with my kids to school return home untouched. I usually send a fruit or vegetable as well as a processed  bagged snack. Sadly, the chips and pretzels get eaten while the apple or strawberries sit in the bag until they rot. As a teacher I found a way to insure that my students first eat their healthy snack by giving them more freedom and agency! A small change has improved the diet of so many students. 

The designated time for snack in school is 10:00am. Many of the students are not eating a proper breakfast and they are preoccupied with the question: "is it time for snack yet?" This question is usually asked in the same tone children who are stuck on a long car ride ask: "Are we there yet?".

 In my class, snack can be eaten at anytime if it is an unprocessed fruit or vegetable. Sugar loaded Yo Crunch or granola bars are not a fruit or vegetable! The students quickly embraced this change. Students are bringing in bags of carrots and cucumbers. They are eating all their fruit first thing in the morning and if they  still have room for the processed food they can enjoy the official snack time at 10:00am. 

Instead of trying to convince my students to "eat the frog" first. I give them the freedom to eat healthy during class and the students are more engaged in the learning: nurturing their souls while they are taking care of their bodies. 

I have not found the healthy eating a distraction. When one kid takes out an apple the worst thing that can happen is that another kid pulls out his apple. When a student pops open a bag of Doritos his father brought back from Israel the students around him may start salivating and start imagining when he can send his father to Israel to bring back a bag of Doritos. 

When we get to eating fruits and vegetables our bodies learn to seek out those tastes again. My hope is that the students get their morning fruit and later in the day when they feel hungry they will keep heading to the fruit basket. 

For most children the issue isn't a lack of food: it is the lack of nutrient rich food making its way into the children's stomach. we want our children to eat a nutritious breakfast but they often choose the item which will bring the quickest sugar rush and not the food with the highest nutritional density. Making it easier for the students to eat the fruit and vegetables helps give the healthy food a chance of being consumed!

Yom Yerushalayim: PBL

PBL in Hebrew! My students creativity and hard work produced this great display of the history of Jerusalem throughout the ages. In groups students researched and wrote a report on their  assigned time period. They designed and created a diorama and explained what we can learn from their assigned period. I am grateful to the outstanding Tal AM instructors for their guidance!

Breakout EDU Box: Pesach puzzles

 

We reviewed our Haggadah learning by playing a Breakout game. The students had to solve puzzles and crack codes to open 6 different locks to be able to open the box (which had pretzels and chocolate chips which was turned into hot fudge). directional locks, number locks and key locks. This was an engaging educational fun activity for all the boys.

Jteach created a series of interactive puzzles based on the popular breakout.edu model. I modified most of it so that my students can complete it in Hebrew. 


I also added a scavenger hunt component. Students had to find the keys by following clues and finding invisible ink using an UltraViolet Blacklight
which led them to one of the keys.

My favorite activity was the "Which Way Did They Go?" puzzle, using the directional lock where the students had to learn the pessukim which describes the travels of the Bnei Yisrael in the dessert and map out the directions. They then had to follow the same pattern on the lock.

Quizlet Live! A Great Collaborative Game

Quizlet has been my go to flash card platform until I discovered memrise.com. I abandoned quizlet because I wanted my students to keep reviewing beyond the test. Memrise follows what we know from memory science about long term retention of information. Memrise is a paced memorization system which gamifies the learning and puts a higher value on reviewing. – the longer you’ve known something, the deeper its roots are planted in your mind. Once I discovered Quizlet Live, I am back using quizlet to give my students this fast paced social game to help them review and collaborate with each other. 

Quizlet Live is easy to use, you just need to click a button and it automatically creates the game for you from your quizlet study set. it's free and compatible in Hebrew.



https://quizlet.com/196464927/flash-cards/
Introducing Quizlet Live from Quizlet on Vimeo.

Flipped Classroom with Nearpod using Audio Visuals

Nearpod has been my go-to app for teaching and reviewing content with my students. I have now discovered that I can use Nearpod as a good way to pre-teach or flip my classroom. It is very similar to using Educanon/Zaption to have students stop and answer questions while they are learning. I like using Nearpod because of the flexibility it gives. I have the option to use it as a flipped  classroom activity as well as an in-class activity.

Here is a Mishna (Hebrew)I prepared:

(Note the play button on each content slide)

Here is a Gemara I prepared: Kiddushin 6
(I started with Rabbi Avi Wasser's Power Point and I added the questions and audio)

Get up and move while learning the tenses: עבר, הוה , עתיד

At the Tal AM Winter Institutes, I learned a great way to help my students learn דקדוק in context.  My students are exposed to פעלים by seeing how the שרש can be written in many different ways. Students are introduced to a new שרש. In groups the students fill out post-its with many different variations of the שרש.

Today, we worked on the verb שמח. The students wrote שומח, שמחתי, שמחנו, אשמח תשמח and many more. Then, the students walked with their post-its to the posters and they placed the post-its in the proper שם גוף. For the עבר words the students go to the back of the room (behind them-the past) for עתיד they go to the front of the class (ahead of them-the future and for the הוה words they go to the middle of the room (right next to them-the present). In this short 5 minute activity the students are quickly exposed to an entire cluster of words which are built on the same שרש. The students are moving and they are learning from their peers as they check to see if they need to move any of the post-its which were already placed in the boxes. Following this short activity I then make sure to activate the new verb, להפעיל את המילה,a word which I use as much as possible in the instruction of the unit and I embed the word in the assignments, so that the students are exposed to hearing and using the word in the different tenses.

A Siyyum on Parshat Vayeshev

This is how we celebrated the completion of Parshat Vayeshev. We all put on the hat of the שר האופים! We prepared scrumptious Babka! and we made delicious Sushi!