Dor L’Dor	r«us‰k r«us
Temple Beth-El Religious School January 22, 2003          Number 18		5763 yca 19

Stuff from Laurie Bellet

Now is the perfect time to examine your room critically and give it a fresh look.

I always find it helpful to stand at the doorway to the classroom and eye the space as if I were a parent, seeing the room for the first time.  Do the walls reflect the energy of your group and the content of your curriculum?  Without fail, there are always students whose eyes, and focus, drift. Let your walls speak to these students.  When student attention wanders, it can be captured by the teaching aids on the walls.  Try to achieve a balance, walls rich in information and color yet clear and not overwhelming.  Change your themes every few months, much like a museum changes a feature display.  A visitor should be able to glean, from your walls, what your students are learning.  Be honest when you evaluate how long pieces of information have been haphazardly tacked up.

Take a few minutes and sit at student tables in different areas of your room. What does a student see from that vantage point?  It is important to know if a student's line of vision is obscured from a certain spot or if there is a giant cobweb draping a far corner.  In most classrooms, there will be one shelf where all the odds and ends get stashed.  I call it the "just put it over there" shelf.  By sitting in various spots, you may discover a single region of your room begging to be uncluttered.

If you have some particularly stubborn decorating dilemmas, ask a fellow teacher for suggestions or ask our art teacher, Rachel Kardon or me.  You can create a space that you, and your students, find comfortable and inviting and reflects your passion for Judaism.  And now is the perfect time!

Z’man Kehilla

Spend the first 15 to 30 minutes creating community in your classroom and with the other class in your grade.  This could mean asking the questions: How was your Shabbat?  Did you do anything special this week?  Did you perform any mitzvot this week?   But it could also mean playing a community building game with your students or with the students of the other parallel grade.  Put a Jewish twist on a mixer that you know and lets get our school feeling like they know one another and that they are in a comfortable and safe environment.

Tzedakah

Please email or tell Martha by this Sunday which organization you chose to donate your tzedakah to from last semester.  You will then probably receive a thank you letter from the organization and you can study that organization more in depth as part of your lessons.  Have your class vote on your tzedakah recipients: you should choose one Jewish organization and one “general” organization as your tzedakah recipients.  Find the cause and we’ll find the organization.  Come into class with a few suggestions.  I have letters from organizations that I keep on file in my office and there is also a site called www.tzedaka.org.

PLEASE ENTER THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF TZEDAKAH ON YOUR ENVELOPE AT THE END OF THE DAY.  ELECT A STUDENT TO DO SO.

Get in Full Swing

Now that we have classrooms, don’t place your creativity into a box!  What can you do to make your classes exciting, full of movement, memorable? Can you decorate your classroom into a nightclub in Tel Aviv?   Can you turn you classroom into a ship sailing from Germany to Ellis Island?  Can the hallway be turned into the Sea of Reeds as Moses brings the people of Israel with him to safety?   Will there be a reading, joke, study, thinking, drama, art, basketball corner in your classroom