There may be a nationwide shortage of workers out there, but the Atidaynu workforce is booming. Our Employment Readiness curriculum has reached a new and exciting milestone as we finally moved from theory to practice.

How young is too young to start thinking about careers? While even older students are not yet ready to settle on a career choice, it benefits children to begin thinking about all the options available and what goes into choosing a career. Knowing the correct way to do it can help students avoid falling for all the confounding career planning myths.

After having completed our first mini-robot that could move along surfaces, the Bristle Bot, the students were all awaiting our next attempt at another DIY bot. We introduced a new bot, utilizing all of our collective knowledge of electronics, making sure that batteries, DC motors, and our added accessories which are all connected with wires, are working together to make a unified machine that performs its task.

Science at Atidaynu is all about preparing our students with the tools they need to investigate, question, and learn about the world around them. Therefore, we approach science with hands-on learning activities that open the doors of curiosity. This month we have continued learning about the human body.

The excitement and projects continue in Culture! This month we learned about Parsha Vayeshev, Miketz, Vayigash, and Vayechi. In Parshat Vayeshev, Yaakov gave his favorite son Yosef, the Ketonet Passim, a special jacket. We made edible Ketonet Passim out of graham crackers, frosting, and colorful sour belts! The students enjoyed making Yosef’s jacket while learning the story of the Shevatim.

As the cold weather approaches, we can expect to see snowfall soon. Snowfall gives a great chance to have your children get some extra seasonal physical activity. Below we will discuss different activities that will be sure to warm up our students even on the coldest of days!

The students have been working on a new program to target goals to increase language comprehension and writing. Goals such as recall of facts, getting the main idea, inference skills, and predicting and evaluating written language are addressed by connecting language to images or movies in their heads.

It was a real “work in progress” month in Class 4 as we focussed on employment readiness and pre-vocational skills. The class researched different careers that they would be interested in pursuing.

December marked the start of a very busy and diligent month in Classroom 2. This is because December is Career Month!

While this may ring cliche to adult ears, for children this is a loaded and exciting question. The answers which little ones pro- vide may reflect pride in their parents’ professions or simply their own interests. Either way, children do love to dream about their ‘future- selves’.

We are so proud of our students for making it through the first quarter! They all have been doing so well and making incredible strides in their learning. We have implemented a homework tracking board, a traffic light earning board, and a student of the week board.