Innovation – A Floor, But Not a Ceiling

OJCS Celebrates Innovation Day 2024

Yes, if you are a current parent in our school, you know that we celebrated “Innovation Day” before we celebrated Purim, but my blog has flipped the order. (I really wanted to get my Purim post out before Purim.) That does not mean that we didn’t have an AMAZING “Innovation Day” worth sharing more broadly with our community. The opposite…we had a GREAT day.

I want to be super clear and name that not only did I have virtually nothing to do with the planning and facilitation of this day, I also had virtually nothing to do with the documentation of this day as well. It is my pleasure to use my blog to showcase the work of those who did.

The primary drivers of Innovation Day at OJCS were Josh Ray, who serves as our Makerspace Lead and Middle School Science Teacher, and our Lower School Science Teachers. Everything that you are going to see below is the fruit of their labours – with photo collages captured by Lianna Krantzberg, who dabbles in social while serving as our Student Life Lead. Together with other special events such as Global Maker Day, the JNF Hackathon, the Global Student Showcase, along with regularly scheduled lessons in our Makerspace, Innovation Day shows how OJCS serves as an incubator of innovation for it students (and teachers!).

So. What was this day all about?

Grade 8 – Simple Machines Project

We often say that doing something with a machine requires less work. In this design challenge, you will be responsible for helping design a new sled for students at OJCS to use. Using as many of the six simple machines you learned about in class, your task is to use the design thinking process to design, test, and build a simple machine sled prototype that students can safely use. You will give your innovative sled a name and create a pitch to market your sled to potential investors. May the best sled win!

Your Goal: Working on your own or with a partner, decide which simple machines will be part of your sled design. After researching the six different types of simple machines and realistic DIY sled builds, create a plan for your prototype. Determine what materials you will need and the size and quantity of materials. You may use any materials from home and supplement any other necessary materials from Home Depot. Then, plan how you will proceed. All sections will be presented as part of a 5-minute product pitch that must include the following 5 sections (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test). The pitch will include all information displayed on a tri-fold board presented in front of investors (judges) and will be graded based on the judging rubric.

Grade 7 – Animal Structures Project

All animals, like people, require shelter to protect them from the harsh elements of nature as well as predators. In this design challenge, you will take on the role of an engineer and be responsible for helping design an innovative structure for an animal of your choosing. Using the information about stability, forces, symmetry, and structure types you learned about in class, your task is to use the design thinking process to design a new shelter prototype that animals can safely use using the CoSpaces VR program. You will give your innovative shelter a name and create a pitch to market your structure to potential investors. May the best structure win!

Your Goal: Working on your own or with a partner, decide which animal you would like to build a house/shelter for. After researching stability, forces, symmetry, and structure types as well as the current animal shelters for your chosen animal on the market, you will create a plan for your prototype. Using the Five Freedoms as a guide, determine what structure type you are going to construct, what materials your structure will need, and what strategies you will use to provide stability. You will also need to determine what forces (internal/external) your structure will need to withstand and describe what techniques you used to provide strength and avoid structural failure. You will include this information in your structure design using the virtual reality CoSpaces program for potential investors to see. All sections of the Design Thinking Process will be presented as part of a 5-minute product pitch that must include the following 5 sections (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test). The pitch will include all information displayed on a tri-fold board presented in front of investors (judges) and will be graded based on the judging rubric.

Grade 6 – Electricity Project

Your Goal: In this project, you will build a series circuit that lights a bulb using a power source and conducting wires. Then predict what will happen to the brightness of your bulb if you add more bulbs or batteries to your series circuit, and test your prediction.

All sections will be presented as part of a Google Slides (or equivalent) presentation with each slide representing each step in the Scientific Method.

Grade 5

Using the design thinking framework, the students answered the question: How can we provide electricity to community outdoor spaces in an energy efficient way that still maintains the safety and “fun” aesthetic of the space?

Grade 4

Grade 3

We have jumped right into our Strong and Stable Structures unit in preparation for Innovation Day: 1.) Assess effects on society and the environment of strong and stable structures. 2.) Assess the environmental impact of structures built by various animals, including structures built by humans.

We worked with Marshmallows and Toothpicks to learn about strong shapes and building strong structures!
We have taken the information we learned from this activity and applied it to the designing and building of newspaper bridges!

Will the bridges be able to hold up THREE heavy textbooks!?

Grade 2

Grade One

Students are keeping busy with their projects for Innovation Day. They are really putting in the effort, collaborating and designing their projects to make them the best they can be. Building something from scratch can be a real challenge, but it’s also a great opportunity to learn new skills and collaborate with others.

Kindergarten

Thank you so much to everyone who was able to join us for Innovation Day in KA and KB on Wednesday!! The students worked so hard to create their flying machines and to learn about the 4 forces of flight. They were so proud to share what they had learned and created with you. You can watch and listen to the “What Makes Airplanes Fly?” song here and check out the pictures of the process of creating and testing their bamboo helicopters, hovercrafts, and hoop gliders…

Junior Kindergarten

A huge ‘kol ha’kavod’ to JK for their first innovation day! What a fun morning! Thank you to all of our guests for popping in to experiment with us!

Leading up to this morning, JK was heavily invested in learning about what makes objects sink or float. They learned about density, and even conducted an eggsperiment – no, wait, an experiment – to change the density of water so that an object that sank (an egg haha) was now able to float! Check out the booklets your children brought home in their backpacks to re-create the experiment at home! Their main challenge was to build a popsicle stick raft to get their dinosaur across the water table. As the joke goes… Why did the dinosaur cross the river? To get to the other side.

Did our students have an amazing day putting all their passion, talent, knowledge and creativity to good use?

I’d say “yes” – this was a great day of learning at OJCS!

Coming Attractions

We are headed into the last two-action packed weeks of the 2022-2023 school year! WHAT A YEAR! The theme, coming out of COVID, was “getting our mojo back” and back our mojo has been. A quick perusal of my weekly blog posts paint a picture of a year where pauses became unpaused, progress was made across a whole host of school systems and processes, and challenges made themselves clear. That’s what school is all about. Not everything is perfect, there is more work to do to be our best self, but each year we reach closer to our North Stars. I am so proud of our teachers, our students and our families for all that we have done this year…and I am very excited for what the next year is scheduled to bring.

Speaking of…

This will likely be my third-to-last weekly blog post before moving into summer mode. I will take next week off as it is my pleasure to accompany our Grade 8s on their GRAD Trip to NYC. During our last week of school, I will share the content of my charge to our graduates and – as always – share what we know to be true about who our amazing 2023-2024 faculty and staff will be and what they will be doing (including any openings to be filled). So what does that leave for this week?

This will be the third of my updates on all things next year. Two weeks ago, I provided an important update on the building renovation. Last week, I shared the news of our transition from trimester to semester and why. This week, I will move into rapid-fire mode, with a bullet-pointed list of things to know or to keep an eye out towards as we head into summer.

Here’s what to know in literally no particular order…

We have had so much success this year with launching the internationally recognized French DELF certification process for our Grade 8 Extended French students and look forward to extending it further to our whole Grade 8 cohort next school year. Students who pass will enter high school with a confirmed level of irrefutable functioning and gain access to the programs they have their eyes set on.
We will restore the Middle School schedule on Fridays so that we are better able to run Jewish Studies as per normal on the weeks we don’t have an amazing “Mitzvah Trip” planned. This will ensure that we are only sacrificing academic time when the activity is worthy, which will make the Mitzvah Trips more meaningful and minimize and mitigate loss from other Jewish Studies coursework.
Speaking of “Mitzvah Trips” we have a VERY EXCITING NAMING ANNOUNCEMENT coming this fall that will – FOR SURE – warm your heart and make you proud to be part of our special community. Stay tuned!
Speaking of “Jewish Studies coursework”, as part of a long-term goal to increase the rigor and the opportunity to engage with rabbinic text, we will transition our Rabbinics Course from a three-day-a-week to a five-day-a-week course and transition our Jewish Ethics & Values Course in reverse. This will be better aligned with the content and our priorities.
As shared by email, we have updated our Acceptable Use Policy for Technology to account for VPNs to ensure our students are only able to access safe and appropriate websites, apps and platforms while at school.
We will hire an additional resource teacher next year to make meaningful progress towards relieving the stress on our system. This is the #1 issue raised by both parents and teachers and although this move may not fully resolve the issue, it is a significant step in the right direction. We’ll have more to share on this as the Special Education Department finishes a needs assessment based on next year’s enrollment.
In order to be better aligned with the “Science of Reading” and with where Canadian schools are heading, we are moving away from STAR Reading as one of our primary assessment tools and will be training our teachers on Amplify. Parents will definitely notice the difference and not just come progress report/report card/parent-teacher conference time. In addition to the Amplify platform, our teachers will continue to use a Structured Word Inquiry approach also supported by the Science of Reading for reading and spelling instruction. Our primary teachers (K-2) will also be trained using the UFLI Foundations program to enhance and solidify phonemic awareness skills in our youngest students.
We are working through an entire reorganization of the systems in our school that deal with behavior management and classroom discipline. It will include different roles for both the Principal and the Head of School, as well as a different allocation of responsibilities within and outside the Special Education Department. It will continue to be anchored in our North Stars and aligned with the 7 Habits, and the continued work we are doing within the framework of Collaborative Problem Solving, but redesigned to be more clear, more streamlined and, most importantly, better set up our students and our classes for success. This is the #2 issue raised by parents and by teachers and making significant progress next year is a necessity.
The Jewish Studies Faculty will continue to have access to a consultant from Hebrew at the Center so that we can progress on our goal of putting in writing a full set of benchmarks and standards for Jewish Studies at OJCS. This is a multiyear project (to do it correctly) and this will be Year Two. We are eager to put in parents’ hands more detail about what they can expect their children to be learning in Jewish Studies and welcome the accountability that such specificity invites.

Is there more than this? Of course, but we can’t give away all the excitement and surprises here! (Plus I could use a few topics for blog posts during the dog days of summer.)

Feel free to follow the fun on social when OJCS Takes Manhattan next week!

OJCS Celebrates Innovation Day

One of my great joys over the last six (!) years has been watching the evolution from “Science Fair” to “STEM” to “STEAM” to “Innovation Day”. Each iteration has brought our school – and our students – closer to a high dream of fusing science benchmarks with STEAM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Art-Mathematics) standards with Makerspace skills all blended together with creativity, student voice and presentation rubrics to become this thing that we now call “Innovation Day”.

However, we might as well have called it #OJCSNorthStarsDay since a day like this reaches so close to so many of them…

…”We learn better together”? We sure did today as, for many, collaboration was the key to innovation.

…”We own our own learning”? Students had lots of opportunities for choice-making which inspired their creativity.

…”A floor, but no ceiling”? The sky was the limit as to how high they chose to aspire.

…”Ruach”? Did they have fun? Check out the smiles below and tell me.

The primary drivers of Innovation Day at OJCS were Josh Ray, who serves as our Makerspace Lead and Middle School Science Teacher, and our Lower School Science Teachers. Everything that you are going to see below is the fruit of their labours – with photo collages captured by Staci Zemlak-Kenter, who dabbles in social while serving as our Development Director. Together with Global Maker Day and the regularly scheduled lessons in our Makerspace, Innovation Day shows how OJCS serves as an incubator of innovation for it students (and teachers!).

So. What was this day all about?

In a nutshell…this:

Grade 8 – Simple Machines Project

We often say that doing something with a machine requires less work. In this design challenge, you will be responsible for helping upgrade the gymnasium and physical education programming here at OJCS. Using your knowledge of simple machines, your task is to use the design thinking process to design, test, and build a simple machine prototype that enhances our physical education curriculum.

Your Goal: Working on your own or in a group, decide which simple machine game or project template you will use to build your project. After researching the six different types of simple machines, create a plan for your prototype. Determine what materials you will need and, the size and quantity of materials. Then, plan how you will proceed. All sections will be presented as part of a 5 section (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) presentation to be displayed on a tri-fold board and presented in front of judges.

Grade 7 – Filtration Project

You are now working for the Clean Water Environmental Engineering Company and have been asked to design a new water filtration system for a small community with a polluted water supply. First, the company is going to look at different types of filter material to determine which ones work well. Then each group in the company will design a filtering system to clean up the polluted water.

Your Goal: In this hands-on project, you will investigate different filtering methods for removing pollutants from a dirty water mechanical mixture. You will design, build and test your own water filters.

Grade 6 – Electricity Project

Grade 5

Grade 4 – Medieval Times & Pulleys/Gears

Grade 3

Grade 2

And our JK, SK & Grade 1s celebrated all things “Science” as well!

Did our students have an amazing day putting all their passion, talent, knowledge and creativity to good use?

I’d say “yes” – this was a great day of learning at OJCS!

A Ruach Week Trip Around the OJCS Student Blogfolio-Sphere

I can assure you that this regular reminder of our student blogfolios with its concomitant plea for your visitation is not a function of being out of ideas of what to say (or because I have been busy making costume changes all Ruach Week!). It is also not a function of believing that blogging is the primary or most important thing that we do at OJCS – it is not. But because blogs and blogfolios do makeup the spine of which much else is built around; and because they are outward facing – available for you and the general public to read, respond and engage with – I do want to make sure that I keep them top of mind.

For most of my professional life, I have had two children in (my) schools where they maintained blogfolios. I subscribed to them, of course, but I am not going to pretend that I read each and every posting, and certainly not at the time of publication. So this is not about shaming parents or relatives whose incredibly busy lives makes it difficult to read each and every post. As the head of school where blogfolios are part of the currency, I try to set aside time to browse through and make comments – knowing that each comment give each student a little dose of recognition and a little boost of motivation. But I am certainly not capable of reading each and every post from each and every student and teacher!

When I am able to scroll through, what I enjoy seeing the most is the range of creativity and personalization that expresses itself through their aesthetic design, the features they choose to include (and leave out), and the voluntary writing. This is what we mean when we talk about “owning our own learning” and having a “floor, but not a ceiling” for each student. [North Star Alert!]

It is also a great example of finding ways to give our students the ability to create meaningful and authentic work. But, it isn’t just about motivation – that we can imagine more easily. When you look more closely, however, it is really about students doing their best work and reflecting about it. Look at how much time they spend editing. Look at how they share peer feedback, revise, collaborate, publish and reflect.

Even having come out of COVID-functioning, our classroom blogs and student blogfolios remain important virtual windows into the innovative and exciting work happening at OJCS. In addition to encouraging families, friends and relatives to check it out, I also work hard to inspire other schools and thought-leaders who may visit my blog from time to time to visit our school’s blogosphere so as to forge connections between our work and other fellow-travelers because we really do “learn better together” [North Star Alert!]

So please go visit our landing page for OJCS Student Blogfolios. [Please note that due to privacy controls that some OJCS students opt for avatars instead of utilizing their first names / last initials which is our standard setting. That may explain some of the creative titles.]

Seriously go! I’ll wait…

…

English, French and Hebrew; Language Arts, Science, Math, Social Studies, Jewish Studies and so much more…our students are doing some pretty fantastic things, eh?

I will continue to encourage you to not only check out all the blogs on The OJCS Blogosphere, but I strongly encourage you to offer a quality comment of your own – especially to our students. Getting feedback and commentary from the universe is highly motivating and will help this snowball grow as it hurtles down the hill of innovative learning.

Let’s Talk About the Future…Again: The “Sneak Peek” Town Hall 2023

As discussed, connected to our larger theme this year of “Getting Our Mojo Back”, last night we held the third of our three critical conversations this year, that both hearkened back to give everyone equal footing and dreamed forward to give everyone an equal stake. Last night’s “town hall” was dedicated to the school’s learning journey over the last few years and to share a “sneak peek” about where our journey is headed into our next chapter. Thank you to the many parents who joined us!

What I’d like to do here, is provide a kind of annotated guide to the slides that were presented – layering in a bit of my own commentary. Parent voice is critical to our ability to dream big dreams, since you, our parents, are our most important stakeholder community and partner. Please add your voice to the conversation in whichever way is comfortable for you – comment on this blog, shoot me a private email, or make an appointment to come in.

This takes the village.

The initial set of slides were intended to level-set; to ensure that whenever a family joined their journey to the school’s, that we share a common view and a common language about where we have been and where we are headed. One of our “North Stars” is about “owning our learning”. Another way of framing that is to say that we “own our own stories” – and the degree to which parents are able to share in our larger narrative is a sign of health.

Let’s start with our “what”…

It is always nice to be reminded of our “why”…

And along with our “what” and our “why”…comes our “how”…

And nice reminder about our “who”…

And a important reminder of “why now”…

What about our “where” you may ask? We’ll get there…

We then pivoted to highlight the big takeaways from our two prior “Critical Conversations”. You can revisit the “Let’s Talk About the ‘J’ in OJCS…Again” Town Hall here; you can visit the “Let’s Talk About French…Again. L’assemblée de Français 2022” here.

Moving forward, we leaned into two big-ticket items that are already generating excitement in their “soft launches” with so much more to come…

Up first…The OJCS Makerspace!

And this is just the beginning…

Next up? “Mitzvah Trips”!

What other big dreams to we have?

Oh…and that “where” we mentioned earlier? Here are the first glimpses of what will be coming to OJCS as soon as next school year:

Stay tuned for a full set of drawings and renderings…and timetable.

And, finally, again, a reminder of what this is all about…

Need to be even more excited about the future of OJCS as enrollment for 2023-2024 has opened up? (And “thank you” to all the families who have already applied/enrolled!) We have two important events on the calendar:

SK Information Night, February 16th @ 7:00 PM
Middle School Information Night, March 2nd @ 7:00 PM

For more information about either, or to simply schedule a tour, please contact our Admissions Director, Jenn Greenberg, at [email protected].

OJCS Celebrates #GlobalMakerDay

Sure, we were a bit delayed in joining in with the rest of the school world due to the Jewish Holidays, but we more than made up for it with an incredible day of learning, making, innovating, and joy as the Ottawa Jewish Community School celebrated #GlobalMakerDay on Thursday, October 20th! We might as well have called it #OJCSNorthStarsDay since a day like this reaches so close to so many of them…

…”We learn better together”? We sure did today as collaboration was the key to innovation.

…”We own our own learning”? Students got to choose which challenges inspired their creativity.

…”A floor, but no ceiling”? The sky (literally in a few cases) was the limit as to how high they chose to aspire.

…”Ruach”? Did they have fun? Check out the smiles below and tell me.

The primary drivers of #GlobalMakerDay at OJCS were our #MakerspaceThree. As I shared a while back in a post about the (re)launch of our OJCS Makerspace (generously supported by a gift from the Congregation Beth Sholom Legacy Fund), we have three teachers who spent much of last year in a consultation with Future Design School (generously supported by a grant by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa’s Fund for Innovative Capacity Building) – Josh Ray, who serves as our “Makerspace Lead”, Faye Mellenthin and Michael Washerstein. [With a huge assist from our Global Learning Lead Julie Bennett!] Everything that you are going to see below is the fruit of their labors – with photo collages captured by Staci Zemlak-Kenter, who dabbles in social while serving as our Development Director. This, along with the beginning of regularly scheduled lessons in the Makerspace, is just the beginning of how this space will serve as an incubator of innovation at OJCS.

So. What was this day all about?

In a nutshell…this:

Do you want to see what all 15 challenges were? If so, keep scrolling! [NOTE: You will not be able to click through to the videos and printables.] If not, feel free to jump to the end!

Did our students have an amazing day putting all our skills, materials, creativity to good use?

I’d say “yes” – this was great day of learning at OJCS! What new dream will we dream in the OJCS Makerspace? Stay tuned!

(Re)Launching the OJCS Makerspace

As our school and community begin to gently ease itself slowly back to that elusive thing we once knew as “normal”, I am very pleased to share that we have completed the “Makerspace Consultancy” that I had announced earlier in the year, and that we are gearing up to finally establish the Makerspace (built with a gift from the Congregation Beth Shalom Legacy Fund) as the hub of innovation for OJCS that it was designed to be.

To refresh…

Thanks to a generous grant by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa‘s Fund for Innovative Capacity Building, OJCS worked with Future Design School over the balance of this school year on a strategic makerspace consultancy. The OJCS Makerspace Design Team included Josh Ray, our Middle School Science Teacher, Faye Mellenthin, our Grade 4 General Studies Teacher, Mike Washerstein, a Middle School Jewish Studies and Grade 6 Language Arts Teacher, and was headed up by Melissa Thompson, our Teaching & Learning Coordinator (and Grades 7 & 8 LA Teacher). This was to ensure that the principles, the units, the standalone lessons, etc., cut across grades and languages and will allow us to not only build content that we can use right away, but to build capacity that we can use to develop curriculum and programming into the future.

We had our final meeting last week and received one of our deliverables – a slide deck that I am going to cherry-pick from below. In a truly post-COVID world, we would have scheduled one of our World Famous OJCS Town Halls and presented there. And we still may in the future, but for now, let my blog be the platform for sharing out the amazing work our team of teachers did in collaboration with our wonderful partners at Future Design School.

What were the goals?

What wound up being our “guiding principles”?

How do we get there?

How will we try to do this?

How about our students?

How will we do this?

When will all of this begin?

SOON!

The Makerspace Design Team – who I cannot thank enough for their time, commitment and passion – and I will be meeting during the Spring so that we bring all this excitement, creativity and innovation to life next school year, if not sooner.

As enrollment continues to come in – and thank you to the many, many parents who re-enrolled on time, and welcome to the many new families joining our OJCS Family for 2022-2023 – the relaunch of the OJCS Makerspace will help move our school that much closer to our North Stars and make learning that much more motivating and engaging for our students. We can’t wait to see what our students invent and create! And, yes, say it with me, this too is very much #TheOJCSDifference.

Do you want your child to benefit from all that an OJCS education provides? It isn’t too late! Please contact our Admissions Director, Jennifer Greenberg ([email protected]) to set up a tour today!

Another Trip Around the OJCS Student Blogfolio-Sphere

I can assure you that this regular reminder of our student blogfolios with its concomitant plea for your visitation is not a function of my from time-to-time challenge in finding a prompt for blogging. (Although that is definitely a challenge some weeks!) It is also not a function of believing that blogging is the primary or most important thing that we do at OJCS – it is not. But because blogs and blogfolios do makeup the spine of which much else is built around; because the pandemic has required us to lean into them more regularly; and because they are outward facing – available for you and the general public to read, respond and engage with – I do want to make sure that I keep them top of mind.

For most of my professional life, I have had two children in (my) schools where they maintained blogfolios. I subscribed to them, of course, but I am not going to pretend that I read each and every posting, and certainly not at the time of publication. So this is not about shaming parents or relatives whose incredibly busy lives makes it difficult to read each and every post. As the head of school where blogfolios are part of the currency, I frequently set aside time to browse through and make comments – knowing that each comment give each student a little dose of recognition and a little boost of motivation. But I am certainly not capable of reading each and every post from each and every student and teacher!

This year, with the building still largely sealed off due to COVID protocols, our classroom blogs and student blogfolios remain important virtual windows into the innovative and exciting work happening at OJCS. In addition to encouraging families, friends and relatives to check it out, I also work hard to inspire other schools and thought-leaders who may visit my blog from time to time to visit our school’s blogosphere so as to forge connections between our work and other fellow-travelers because we really do “learn better together” [North Star Alert!]

Seriously go! I’ll wait…

…

English, French and Hebrew; Language Arts, Science, Math, Social Studies, Jewish Studies and so much more…our students are doing some pretty fantastic things, eh?

I will continue to encourage you to not only check out all the blogs on The OJCS Blogosphere, but I strongly encourage you to offer a quality comment of your own – especially to our students. Getting feedback and commentary from the universe is highly motivating and will help this snowball (no pun or passive-aggressive take on what is happening outside my window!) grow as it hurtles down the hill of innovative learning.

OJCS Announces NEW Makerspace Consultancy

Again, for the second week in a row, I am tempting the fates by assuming that we have entered a period of somewhat normalcy and, again, hoping to avoid a jinx. This week, it is to announce an exciting consultancy we have launched at OJCS that will – finally – allow us to truly roll out the Makerspace as it was originally intended to be. Do you remember way back in March 2019, when we announced that thanks to a generous gift from the Congregation Beth Shalom Legacy Fund, that we were going to take on our first major project to make our physical space as innovative as our educational program – namely designing and constructing the OJCS Makerspace?

It feels like a lifetime ago! After design, came construction and after construction came furnishing and timing being everything, you may recall that it took until about a full calendar year later, January of 2020, that we were finally able – even though there were (are!) still some design elements and furnishings not yet in place – to begin using the Makerspace. That means that by the time Middle School Science relocated to their new space, we had about a month or so of contact time and then…COVID. Thanks to COVID we either could not use the space at all or had such limitations on its usage due to safety protocols that its functionality was severely compromised. Long story short…we built this amazing space and still haven’t had much of an opportunity to use it the way that it was designed.

But that’s about to change…

Knowing that for 2021-2022 we could return to the “soft launch” of the space, and believing that in 2022-2023 we ought to be able to officially launch, we decided to engage a consultancy to ensure that we wind up using the space in the best possible way. And so I am pleased to share that thanks to a generous grant by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa‘s Fund for Innovative Capacity Building, OJCS will be working with Future Design School over the balance of this school year on a strategic makerspace consultancy.

What will we be doing?

Well, as was the case with our last two consultancies, we have identified a small cohort who will work with Future Design School to…

Create a statement of principles, in collaboration with the OJCS team, that defines what the makerspace at OJCS is focused on, and how it will be leveraged.
Provide scaffolded support to the Middle School Science teacher and two other teachers to develop an approach for designing lessons to be delivered in the makerspace.
Provide recommendations in a final summary from consultancy on next steps to be taken with all teachers to integrate the use of the makerspace into their lessons.

The OJCS Makerspace Design Team will include Josh Ray, our Middle School Science Teacher, Faye Mellenthin, our Grade 4 General Studies Teacher, Mike Washerstein, a Middle School Jewish Studies and Grade 6 Language Arts Teacher, and will be headed up by Melissa Thompson, our Teaching & Learning Coordinator (and Grades 7 & 8 LA Teacher). This ensures that the principles, the units, the standalone lessons, etc., cut across grades and languages and allows us to not only build content that we can use right away, but to build capacity that we can use to develop curriculum and programming into the future.

We have our first meeting next week and we will share results and updates as they start to happen. Not only can we not wait to start using the Makerspace to its fullest potential, we also cannot wait to show you all that it can do and be. Maybe even in person! Stay tuned.

Shofar, So Good: First Days & First (Masked) Smiles

What a strange and wonderful week! Starting school after Rosh Hashanah and being back in school in person?!!

On behalf of the teachers, staff, administration, and board of this school, I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have actual live human beings again filling our building with their energy, their ruach, and their smiles (we’ve all become experts at seeing smiles beneath masks)! We have rightfully put so much energy into our COVID safety protocols over the last two school years that it is easy to forget that we are not public health officials, but educators who are in the business of teaching and learning. I have had ample opportunity to wander the hallways, to be in classrooms, and outside in playgrounds and after just two days of school, I am perfectly able to pronounce that as of now shofar so good!

Here’s just a little taste of what the first two days at OJCS have looked and felt like…

…we began our first day with two “Welcome Ceremonies”. With Junior Kindergarten returning to OJCS this year, we conducted special “Welcome Ceremonies” for parents in both JK and SK to mark the beginning of their children’s formal Jewish day school journey at OJCS. We gathered under (socially distanced) tallitot as each grade- level team shared a welcome poem with their students. We joined together in shehechiyanu and then it was time for hugs, kisses, last photos and goodbyes. We are always honoured – and never take for granted – when a family chooses OJCS to provide the sacred and holy task of education, and we hope this is just the first of many rituals and moments we share together in the years to come.

…we held our annual Welcome Back Assembly, still virtual for at least one more year, during which we introduced new teachers and celebrated our opening havdalah where we creatively appropriate the ritual of separation to mark the transition from the summer to the start of school. We were encouraged to think about what from the summer we want to carry forward into school and, considering the season, to think about who we were last year and who we hope to be in the year to come.

…students found their way back to lockers and classrooms that have been waiting for them since last April.

…playgrounds and courtyards were filled with laughter and games and, for Middle School, food as the Outdoor Cafeteria is back and open for business.

…everyone is remembering/learning which entrances and exits and washrooms and water fountains and hallways belong to them, and how to find their way from this to that.

…there is a joyful cacophony of Hebrew, French and English that captures our trilingual nature and is a pleasure to hear throughout the building.

…the OJCS Makerspace is gearing back up for a delayed reopening and you should stay tuned for an exciting announcement about the Makerspace!

We have seen over the last two years how amazing our teachers have been during distance learning pivots planned and unplanned and through hyflex engagement. And we know that our community has been paying attention as our enrollment continues to grow each and every year. Imagine how extraordinary our school is going to be now that we have planned out each and every scenario! If you are a current OJCS parent, of course, you don’t have to imagine – you can see it each and every day.

Please save the date for Virtual Back to School Night on Tuesday, October 12th at 7:00 PM. In addition to all the normal things one discusses at Back to School Night, this year we will also be sharing grade-specific plans for how students who may be kept home from school for different reasons will be able to continue to learn even as we move away from hyflex learning.

Please be on the lookout for updated COVID vaccine policies now that both the Ministry of Education and Ottawa Public Health have shared new requirements and recommendations for private schools.