Observation

I went to observe Samuel this week, and as with the previous years, I swelled with pride and loved seeing him work.

The first piece of work he wanted to show me was reading Hebrew words and placing the words next to the corresponding pictures. His Hebrew reading is excellent. He then did an Engligh reading exercise where he read the sentence that described the picture on the card. He chose "The glass has lots of frost". He got the first 3 words after a few tries of sounding them out and then stumbled on "lots" which he pronounced as "slot" several times. Seeing him read easily in Hebrew and struggling with English really pointed out how hard a language English is, with vowels and groupings of consonants having so many sounds.

After reading, he showed me the stamp game and added 4-digit numbers. When he wrote the solution, he inverted the number 9. When he couldn't find an eraser, I showed him how he could cross it out and write the 9 in the row underneath. He liked the crossing out and crossed out each of the other 3 numbers in the solution and wrote the numbers again on the row below.

Then came examining the bee and monarch butterflies. With the magnifying glass you could see the eyes, the wings, the colours, the stinger.

Then he worked with geometry material, triangles that when put together form squared, rhombuses, triangles, trapezoids. Material I remember working with.

And last was this hammering activity, where he copied a design from a card and hammered little pins into the center of each shape.

All in all a great show case of this work, maturity, progress, and our decisions about his education.