Garinim

This week we learned about our bodies! The children have been practicing yoga rolling their heads, shrugging their shoulders, making round circles with their arms, hands both in Hebrew and in English. They love stretching their arms, running in place or walking holding hands! It’s a lot of work to encourage the children to walk together! We sang Modeh Ani and added some hand movements to the song.

In our Practical Life area of the classroom we have set up some tricky pouring and sponging activities for the children to enjoy. We have added a sparkly snowflake tonging activity along with a whisking water and soap to make some big bubbles! The children had a new activity to match a key with a number to a lock that has dots on a lock. If they successfully match the key and the lock it would open!

In our sensory table we added different nuts and bolts for the children to screw and unscrew. A tricky part of separating these items is that they had to match to a corresponding shape, I.e. circles, triangles etc.

In our Art Center we arranged an open ended art project with  glueing eyes, hair, mouths, and different shaped pasta to craft how they see their bodies and bones. We will have this project out for the children throughout the following week as well.

Wednesday was our challah dough making day and all the children enjoyed squeezing the very squishy dough this week. The children enjoyed listening to the story, I’m Going to Like Me by Jamie Curtis and Laura Cornell.

Thursday was challah day and boy do our challot look and smell amazing!

The children helped to transplant a plant and we have the beginning of a new bud!

Friday we had a wonderful time in the Chapel singing all of our favorite Shabbat songs. Morah Wendy, from the Anafim classroom, told us the story about how Hashem instructed Moshe/Moses to give the Hebrews the Ten Commandments! We went back to our classroom and this week our challah was exceptionally delicious!

 

Alim

This week was very exciting.  We started a few new units.  In Science, we talked about the Human Body. In Geography, we started talking about the Continents of the World.  

Monday-  We reconnected after the weekend.  We all had a chance to talk with our talking flower.  The purpose of this activity is to wait turns and listen to friends. We reviewed the new work in the classroom.  We read new stories about the human body.  There were ample human body worksheets and a self portrait activity to make their own face.  Also, we went to visit coach Oren and played tag on the scooters.  The kids had fun. 

Tuesday- We went over the Sound of the Week "Cc".  We read an alphatale book called CopyCats.  There were letter formation sheets and Sound association sheets for the Sound of the Week.

Wednesday-

We flew on the pretend airplane in our classroom to the Continent of North America.  We all got on board our pretend plane.  First stop was North America.   We will talk about North America for a few weeks.   There is North American push pinning work and a worksheet of North America to color in. Also, we talked about the animals of North America. 

Thursday-

We had a busy work day in the classroom.  The kiddos were busy working.

Friday-

Yay!  Shabbat Shalom.  We did our fun parsha with Morah Wendy in the chapel.  We blessed our Challah and enjoyed the grape juice.  The shabbat box went home to Taylor and her family.  We look forward to all the adventures she has with Shual.  Have a nice weekend.

Alim Judaics Rosh, ketef, berech, veetzbaot! We learned a new song this week: head, shoulders, knees and toes! 

On Monday we started learning about body parts in Hebrew. We learned a lot of new words!

On Tuesday we continued to talk about the body parts and we played Aleph Bet bingo.

On Wednesday we prepared our challah dough and we started reading a book called The Hebrew Alphabet by Sarah Mazor and Yael Rosenberg.

On Thursday we finished the book from the day before, braided our challah and sang the aleph bet song.

Friday we celebrated Shabbat with our friends at the chapel, sang songs and listened to the parsha. In the classroom we celebrate Shabbat with grape juice and challah.

Have a restful Shabbat and a wonderful weekend.

 

Anafim

Even though the sky has been cloudy and gloomy for days, we have been alive in the Anafim classroom.  This week was all about the human body.  We had fun identifying different body parts in both English and Hebrew.  This was done through a couple of games and songs and the children had a blast with these.  We also spent time looking at bones.  We discussed that bones have a strong hard outer shell and a strong spongy inside.  We also worked on naming lots of different bones including skull, spine, pelvis, humerous, femur and more. 

A mortar and pestle were introduced this week and the children really enjoyed grinding up spices.  They had the choice to choose between cinnamon sticks, cloves, or black peppercorns.  The cinnamon was definitely the most popular choice!

In gym class on Monday we had a chance to ride the scooters around the gym again playing tag.  The children were not so enthusiastic about this game so after a few rounds we decided to switch things up and played red light green light on our scooters.  The children really enjoyed this twist on their game. 

This was our week off from making challah so we took advantage of some extra time and made a fresh batch of play dough.  We opted for white this time so that we could make bones and skeletons out of our play dough. 

On Friday we were joined for Shabbat by Emma’s dad.  We had a lovely walk down to the chapel and enjoyed singing our favorite Shabbat songs together.  This week there was a special treat and our very own Morah Wendy led the parsha.  We heard about how long the Hebrews had been wandering in the desert (2 and a half months) when they came upon the beautiful Mount Sinai.  G-d called Moses to come up the mountain and gave him the 10 commandments.  Several children were called up to hold the 10 commandments as they were read aloud.  Back in the classroom we enjoyed some challah made for us by the Garanim class.  It sure was tasty.  Just as we were finishing up our Shabbat celebration the fire alarm sounded.  This was a planned drill and we quickly exited our classroom and made our way safely outside.  We waited for the all clear before returning to our room.  Some of the friends were a little nervous about this but we discussed why it is so important to practice and why the alarm is so loud (so that we can hear it everywhere and know to get out quickly).  We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will keep learning about the human body next week.  Shabbat Shalom.

Keshet

There were some bananas left over from our TuB’Shevat seder and we decided to make Banana Muffins!  Everyone was excited, and helpful, and you can now make some at home - they each wrote down the recipe.  (With a better understanding now of ½ and ¼ cup.) 

We introduced ‘doing words’ following along with the Montessori red circle to represent verbs.  (We’ll play this later as we learn more specifically about parts of speech.) The children chose red slips of paper and read their word and did the action for the others to guess the ‘doing word’.  Everyone enjoyed this and continue to choose it as an activity of choice during work time. 

In art they created mixed media winter paintings, using various blues and then added black cut outs for the trees.  

In Science we have begun our unit on the human body.  We started by having each child lay down while we traced around them and they then cut out their outline - now hanging in the hallway.  As we proceed, learning about the inside and outside of our bodies, (the different body systems) we will add to their paper bodies. So far they have their head/face and some added a wax resist watercolor hand cutout.  This is a month long, perhaps longer, science explorative experience.  

Snapshots from this week

https://photos.app.goo.gl/YmaqcUWBjaPztgx6A