Technology, art, and Torah are coming together in a new sixth-grade project that turns students’ self-portraits into original pop art. Co-developed by Director of Technology Lynda Last and art teacher Elizabeth Danziger in their first cross-disciplinary STEAM collaboration, the project moves from the digital space to the physical. When complete, it will join a Creation-inspired exhibit for display on Grandparent & Special Someone Day next month.

Students began by photographing themselves on their Chromebooks and experimenting with Adobe editing tools to remove backgrounds and adjust opacity, contrast, and light exposure. Then they moved to the art room, where they explored the work of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, learning how bold outlines, primary colors, Ben-Day dots, and movement lines create his distinctive comic book-inspired style (below left).

Using their edited photographs as guides, students outlined their faces on clear acrylic, then combined solid colors, dots, and lines to create their own pop-art portraits. Each stage builds on the last. “This is usually a middle school-level project,” explained Mrs. Danziger. “We wanted to give our sixth-graders a chance to explore how digital tools and traditional art techniques can integrate and enhance each other.”


The portraits are part of a school-wide Bereshit-themed project: each grade is currently creating artwork to represent one of the days of Creation. The sixth-grade self-portraits signify the creation of humankind on Day Six. Each grade’s art will be on display for our special visitors in November. We can’t wait for you to see it!

🌱 Nursery Bet: Pumpkin Exploration

Nursery Bet fell into Fall this week with seasonal pumpkin explorations that branched out into math, literacy, and science. Our three-year-olds put pumpkin seeds to work for counting and matching, using the small seeds as manipulatives in a math activity, then uncovered letters hiding in “magic pumpkins” at the light table, making letter recognition a little more magical. To complete the study, they’ll peek inside a real pumpkin, digging into its slippery seeds and stringy insides for a hands-on, sensory-inspired, wonderfully messy lesson in scientific observation!

🌪️ Second Grade: Gas & Volume

Second grade explored gases in science, discovering that air is actually matter: it has mass and takes up space, or volume. Using balloons, students made predictions and recorded observations, noting that adding air made their balloons expand. But what happens when air has nowhere to go? In a second experiment, Ms. Maliner showed how when two bottles were connected at their openings, air trapped below kept water from flowing freely out of the upper bottle. Swirling created a vortex, allowing air to rise through the center as water flowed down around it. Both experiments showed how air takes up space, while the bottles demonstrated displacement: for water to move in, air must move out.

📝  Fifth Grade: Summarizing Shemot

As fifth graders approached the end of their unit on Parshat Shemot, they wrote sikkumim, summaries, of the parsha, turning careful translation into clear understanding. Together, the class worked through challenging words and phrases, identifying Hebrew roots and unpacking their meanings. Students then worked individually, using the translations to retell the psukim (verses) in their own words. Rather than a straight translation, rephrasing the psukim in their original language strengthened vocabulary, comprehension, and kriyah (Torah reading) skills as they prepared for this week’s test.