Garinim 

Who can believe it is April already?  We have been having such a wonderful time together.  At this point in the year the children are completely familiar with the routine of the classroom and are moving more independently through it.  We spent a lot of time this week talking about what we find on a seder plate and what those items look like and a little about why we have them.  The children have begun creating their own seder plate craft and are happily working on each of the 5 components.  We have been singing the 4 questions (mah nishtanah) often this week so hopefully the children are becoming more familiar with it.  We have been so busy with our Montessori activities as well.  The children have delighted in working with colored grading pegs and our new math peg boards.  Water transfers have still been among the most popular activities.  This week we moved styrofoam balls from one bowl of water to another with a small ladle.  It was so tricky to catch the floating balls and move them over but the children were quite excited when they were successful.  They also enjoyed pouring water and beads from a pitcher into another pitcher with a strainer to catch the beads.  Pyramids were still being built this week as well and we even built one as a group during circle time using paper rectangles and had to match them to rectangles on our wall.  Next week we start cleaning and prepping for Pesach (Passover). 

 

Alim

This week we started making our World Continent Maps.  This week we talked about North America and the animals of North America.  Many of the kids pushed-pinned the North America continent for their maps.   This involves extensive fine motor skills.  It’s a lot of work and they have been enjoying it for sure.  We are starting our Mother’s day craft in the classroom and the kids are super excited about that as well.  

 

Alim Judaics  -  We continue to practice and sing the Mah Nishtana/ 4 Questions and enjoyed singing Dayeinu a couple of times.  We also had a lot of fun weaving and creating Afikomen bags to bring home for the Seders.  Morah Sherri put on a little Passover Puppet show with Moses, Pharaoh, Miriam and Pharaoh’s daughter.  We pretended to hammer and dig in the hot  desert sun in of Egypt - building pyramids for Pharaoh while singing ‘ Bang, bang, bang, hold your hammer low. Dig, dig, dig, there’s no time to sleep. Etc.’  We pleaded for Pharaoh to listen and let our people go and hopped like frogs in awe of all the plagues G-d sent to the Egyptians each time they refused to let the Hebrews go free. 

 

Alim Shabbat -  It’s a Passover Shabbat Celebration with my special helpers, Boaz & Oliver!!  Singing and Dancing to ‘We sing Shabbat..’, ‘Pesach Bamba’, ‘Dayeinu’ & ‘The Afikomen Mambo’!! They loved The Passover Parrot, a book by PJ Library and we enjoyed saying the blessings together before snacktime. 

 

 

Keshet

OMG, the week flew by!!! We’re already into April and that means Springtime, rain in Connecticut, daffodils and hyacinths - and that’s just in our school garden! Indoors we are getting ready for Passover: each student is completing their own matzah cover for your seder table (ambitious project for any kindergartner, but these kids are not just any kindergartners ;)

We are in the midst of creating unique haggadot - with the order of the seder and all descriptions enclosed.  We are also dressing up and acting out the Passover story, which is quite an adventure! On Monday and again on Friday the Keshet kids were paired with children in the older grades, singing Passover traditional songs and brachot. This is an Ezra tradition which we are so happy to share again, even if masked. 

Ram celebrated his 6th birthday on Monday and asked his friends to sing Happy Birthday in all the languages we know: English, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Sign language, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Chinese, and we listened to Arabic and Russian versions too. 

In Science we continue with the Solar System - we’re now learning about Jupiter, the largest planet, a thousand times as big as Earth! Jupiter consists mostly of gas with no solid ground to weaken the storms.  We included the Great Red Spot when marble painting the stormy planet. 

 

See this week’s photos here https://photos.app.goo.gl/jo8CkRGdJeQ7qVCdA