Volume 5 Issue 3 April - May 2013 Iyar - Sivan 5773
Kol
Juda and Maria Diener Lower School
Hillel
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Samuel and Henrietta Scheck Middle School
Ben Lipson Upper School
Summer Academy
Personalized Opportunity to Accelerate Through Scheck Hillel’s Summer Academy, students have an opportunity to accelerate, enhance skills, explore enrichments and earn academic credits. Classes offer personalized attention in small learning groups for rising Grade 3-12 students, covering a wide variety of disciplines within General Studies, Judaic Studies and special interests like art, violin and personal fitness. Classes offer flexible sessions ranging from one to six weeks. “The acceleration program is completely individualized so that students work on the skills they need to develop further,” said Dina Freeman, Summer Academy Director. “Current teachers will provide a list of skills to the summer teachers so that we provide a seamless transition into the following year.” Summer Academy also is an opportunity for students to possibly progress to the next level.
While Summer Academy reinforces skills, it also offers grade forgiveness to students in Grades 9-12 and is beneficial for those pursuing honor-level classes. “Students’ academics often decline from the end of one school year to the start of the next,” Freeman said. “Academic work between traveling or camp activities can prevent this while still
offering a fun vacation from school.” Based on research, Freeman said that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (Downey et al, 2004). She said that on average, students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade level equivalence in math skills over the summer months and experience earning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. For information and course options visit ehillel.org/summeracademy or contact Freeman at freeman@ehillel.org.
The Student-Centered Paperless Classroom: Today, Not Waiting for Tomorrow Rabbi Meir Wexler’s classroom looks more like your local Starbucks than it does a traditional lecture hall. Without the coffee, of course. There is definitely no assigned seating. Instead, on any given day, students are spotted on couches and shared tables A classroom devoid of note-taking, you’ll find students working on laptops uploading, downloading and syncing with a range of or tablets. The more digital tools. traditional students work on desktop PCs. This is the new student-centered classroom, and you’ll now find it throughout the Scheck Hillel campus. It is a place where the student is responsible for his/her own learning. Though students are expected to be self-directed, working together to find solutions is encouraged. According to Noa Lalo, Grade 6, “Everyone can work at their own speed.” 2011 Blue Ribbon School
Students can focus on the quality of their work, rather than feel pressured to complete a task by a specific deadline. This “free-form” classroom structure allows Rabbi Wexler and his colleagues to provide something that in the past has been hard to come by for classroom teachers: one-on-one learning. They are free to move about the room and spend time with every student while fully assessing comprehension. Justin Moskovitz, Grade 8, likes Rabbi Wexler’s tech-based Rabbinics class “…because it’s a lot more interesting and challenging.” The technology-driven, student-led classroom approach to learning fosters responsibility, peer-to-peer relations and overall confidence.
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