It has been a full and beautiful week here at our school. We welcomed literally hundreds of special visitors on Tuesday and Wednesday into our classrooms and also hosted the annual JCC Benefit here in our building on Tuesday night – a great celebration of the JCC’s 10 year anniversary since we first opened our […]

When I was in second grade I had a teacher who yelled. My teacher, Mrs. P, teased, she mocked and she embarrassed my classmates when they didn’t have the right answers. I often had the right answers, and the material that she taught came rather easily to me. But I remember feeling guilty. It never […]

This is the season of counting. We count how many more days of school, how many days until camp, how many more shabbat celebrations in our child’s current classroom, and how many more days we need to bundle our children in jackets before Spring emerges for good. It is also the season of counting in […]

Welcome back to school. I hope that everyone had a restful vacation and a meaningful Passover holiday. I appreciated the time off and my own Passover celebration. I was particularly moved this year by the ways in which my own children have become increasingly engaged in this holiday and the multiple ways that their involvement […]

What a whirlwind of a week it has been! Matzah baking, Haggadah making, frogs here, frogs there, frogs are jumping everywhere! It is so beautiful to watch the many ways that the children have integrated these Passover stories into their play, their work, and into their very marrow. Children are crossing the Red Sea in […]

It has been a busy week here at the JCC as we have watched the emergence of spring! Many of the classes have been out and about in and out of the JCC, and many others are observing and discussing all of the changes that they are seeing with the bloom of spring time. As […]

Kings and queens, villains and heroes, beauty pageants and hangings – it is no surprise that the Purim story is compelling to our children! While we have many stories in our tradition with dramatic elements, our Purim story is the most like a fairy tale. In this story we have the quintessential fairy tale-like characters: […]

“I am not a science person,” my eighth grader declared this past week. Despite high grades and positive feedback from her science teacher, she had placed herself, as many of us have, into the “humanities box.” Like all of us, my 13-year-old has an emerging sense that some subjects come more easily, feel more natural, […]

These past few weeks there have been some interesting issues raised in the media concerning personality formation and temperament. The New York Times ran an article on Tuesday, February 14th entitled, “What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty has Benefits” which describes the ways in which novelty seeking, while often associated with Las Vegas gambling and sky […]

This week, in celebration of Tu B’Shevat there was a great deal of conversation about trees and our relationship to nature. I was so impressed by the connections that the children expressed feeling towards plants, trees and other living things. As I watch and listen to all that is taking place I have a sense […]