This week we continued to talk about the human body; our bones, what happens when a bone breaks, a visit to the hospital for an X-ray, protecting our bones.  We included safety and protecting the skull with a helmet, especially when riding a two-wheeler bicycle. Activities included labelling the body, tracing around arm and hand and painting in the bones. We also sang about the five senses and enjoyed pairing activities - dropping droplets of salt water, sweet water and lemon water onto the tastebuds and then pairing the little dropper bottles.  In a similar activity, we have smelling activities, pairing cinnamon, nutmeg and clove infused cotton balls, and pairing little jars of herbs: basil, oregano and thyme - with or without a blindfold! 

 

A good deal of floor space was taken up by large pieces of white paper, quickly filled with a young child's body outline and painted in with whatever it is they were wearing on Wednesday.  Not all children wanted to make 'their body,' but those that did, are quite recognizable, no names necessary!

 

We have been reading about nutrition and the food groups; fruit and vegetables, dairy, protein, grains and 'sometimes food' like sweets and cake.  If your child tells you to brush your teeth after drinking soda, or that there are 16 spoons of sugar in each bottle of soda, you will know where that's coming from!  We took turns describing a particular fruit, or vegetable for the others to guess, including details such as color, size, whether it has a pit, peel that needs to be removed with a knife...  This will lead to continued discussion of trees and fruit as we move toward the next holiday of TuBiShvat.  You will see a list posted outside each classroom where you may sign up to bring in a requested food item for our TuBiShvat seder (for children and teachers), to be held on Tuesday, February 11.  

 

We continued our discussions of bears this week but also talked about ourselves, including what color hair and eyes we have. The children finished up their bear print activities and started their self portraits! We all took turns looking in the mirror and seeing how long our hair is, what color it is, what color our eyes are, what shape our eyes are, etc. The children made large easel portraits of themselves and also smaller paper portraits using the correct color paint or paper. This was a fun activity and the children were very involved in the creation from start to finish.

We continued with our banana slicing activity and made banana bread! Everyone seemed to enjoy this special snack. Baking it and eating it!

We have been playing letter games at group time where the children will be shown three different letters and one will be taken away. They will then have to guess which letter was taken away, and say the name of something that starts with that particular letter. For example, the children may be shown the letters “c”, “h”, and “b”. If “b” is taken away, the children would be expected to recall the letter and then tell us an object in the classroom that starts with that same letter (book). We have also been getting very good at recognizing rhyming words and have been spending time finding those words in our classroom story books. Try this with your child using a random word and see if they can recite a rhyming word.

This week’s parashat group consisted of reviewing parashat Vaera and Bo.
Morah Marisol narrated the stories using colorful slides with no words. It was a very interactive session. One child was assigned to hold up the banner stating “let my people go!” Another child held the responsive banner: “No!”  The children participated in placing the plagues, as they came up in the story, on the poster board. We had a captive audience! The ten plagues: 1) water turns to blood, 2) frogs, 3) lice, 4) flies, 5) livestock dies, 6) boil, 7) hail, 8) locusts, 9) darkness and 10) the death of the firstborn