By Jessica Davis, JTNews Correspondent
Students at Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle celebrated Sukkot with a week of events, including the school’s first Sukkah Math Day on Oct. 16.
On the sixth day of Sukkot, despite the cancellation of some activities due to rainy weather, students participated in Sukkah Math Day. Teachers from every grade — kindergarten through eighth — prepared 45-minute math lessons connected with the school’s 100-person-capacity sukkah.
“It was a good opportunity to fuse Judaics and math,” said Rabbi Stuart Light. “This is the first annual; a new school tradition.”
The event followed JDS’ mission to present an overall program that integrates Judaic and general studies. Second graders went on a Sukkah Hop in the Bellevue area, visiting three different JDS homes that had a sukkah. The students checked the requirements of what makes a kosher sukkah.
“The abundance of mathematical concepts involved in building a kosher sukkah make this holiday an ideal one for math-Judaics integration,” said Rabbi Light. “When building a sukkah you need to pay close attention to its height, number of walls, size of the gaps in the walls and the roof, and the ratio of sunlight to shade that enters the sukkah itself. The construction of a sukkah is just one big math problem, which, for us as a school, means just one more opportunity to illustrate the close connections between all our academic disciplines, both secular and Judaics.”
Third-grade teacher Paula Schwimmer taught a lesson involving measurement, using a non-standard measure — the students’ feet — to measure a wall of the sukkah. The students made a graph of the results and discussed their findings. Fourth grade students visited the sukkah to estimate how many children could sit comfortably inside of it. Some of the eighth graders were assigned to find out how much it would cost to paint the sukkah.
Teachers Annette Revert and Linda Krisher developed an indoor project for about 30 fifth graders, in which the students used their laptop computers to obtain information on sukkot from the Internet. Students compared the cost and sizes of sukkot that they found on several Web sites. An 8’x8’ sukkah was the most popular in size.
“I thought it went really well,” said Revert. “The kids were very excited.”
On Oct. 13, the students had the opportunity to sleep overnight in the sukkah with students from the Seattle Jewish Community School. Using their lingering excitement from the sleepover, the teachers decided to make a project in which the students would plan ahead for next year and ask their families to build a sukkah of their own. About 2/3 of the class already had a sukkah, said Revert. “[The students] were very motivated about it.”
Sukkah Math Day was one of many programs that JDS added to its sukkot festivities this year.
“It was a year for firsts, at least with this holiday,” said Revert. “I thought it was great.”