Ben Porat Yosef fourth grade students held a Heritage Fair on Thursday, March 15. The students and their teachers spent many weeks creating and preparing a performance with diverse Jewish songs and a number of projects that, together, celebrate our collective Jewish heritage with its diverse customs and shared history.

Students kicked off learning about their own heritage by reading the book “The Sign of the Beaver,” a Newbery Honor-winning survival story about a boy who is a colonial settler from New England living in the wilderness, and the relationships that formed between settlers and Native Americans. Students learned about historical fiction, and how actual historical events were presented to create the story of fictional characters. They then researched their own family histories and presented these, along with selected family heirlooms that symbolize an essential part of their individual family’s story. Students wrote descriptive explanations for these heirlooms and created innovative family crests to highlight important aspects of their family’s story. The students also learned interviewing skills by interviewing various family members in order to extract their family’s history, and also collected a recipe from their family’s collection for the fourth grade heritage cookbook. The morning was an amazing display of learning.