We began our week discussing farm animals and then dove into Pesach! We made cow prints by stomping plastic cows into black paint, and we made woolly sheep by gluing cotton balls onto a black sheep cutout. We had fun singing “Old Mac Donald Had a Farm”.

We began the story of King Pharoah and Moses! We even created baby Moses floating down the river in a baby basket.
“King Pharoah awoke with frogs in his bed and frogs on his head. Frogs on his nose and frogs on his toes. Frogs here, frogs there, frogs were jumping everywhere!”

 

In our practical life area, the children were shown glasses cleaning.  They really seemed to enjoy this activity.  We discussed that some children wear sunglasses and how to take care of them.  We traveled to South America this week.  We went to the imagination station and traveled to this warm Continent.  We had to go through customs and get our passports stamped.  It is very sweet and the kids think the pretend airport is fun.  Ask your kids about their passports!!!  Also,  ask them if they can sing you the Continent Song.  The sound of the Week was Tt.  We read a sweet story called When Tilly Turtle Came to Tea.

We are kicking off the Passover unit with the story of Moses as a baby. We also briefly covered what Passover is and why we observe it. We will be delving into this theme in greater detail for the next few weeks. The children were busy coloring and assembling the pieces to the baby Moses craft. We continue to review the alef bet and are working on learning more about ע. The children traced the letter and colored a set of עיניים (eyes) using a mirror to reflect the color of their eyes. 

 

We are already onto the next holiday of Passover!  We did talk a little about farm animals, played animal acting out guessing games, animal names in Hebrew, and some animal stories to wedge the gap between these two holidays. 

On Wednesday we celebrated Ben's fifth birthday! via Zoom with Mom and Dad and all the Anafim classroom helpers, who can't resist a little more screen attention :)

We always try to incorporate practical life lessons into our school experience; including mopping, sweeping, watering plants, and where possible, sewing.  This week some children stitched baby Moses blankets, along with our story of baby Moses in the bulrushes, as the start to our Passover storytelling tradition. Ask your child to sing

(When Moses was) x2

(A little boy) x2

(He floated down) x2

(The River Nile) x2

(And Pharoah's daughter) x2

(Found him lying there) x2

(A playing with) x2

(His teddy Bear) x2

The story continues with Moses growing up in the palace with Pharoah, but witnessing some of the atrocities of slavery in Egypt at the time, Moses left Egypt and went to Midian where he lived as a Shepard, witnessed the Burning Bush, pleaded with Pharoah, unsuccessfully for a long time - even through the experience of the plagues, until the tenth and final plague (death of the first born) which ended slavery for the Israelites in Egypt as they followed Moses out of Egypt and across the Sea of Reeds  ... (In case you want to ask your children some Passover questions.) 

Or better still, ask them to sing The Four Questions, Ma Nishtana Ha-laylah Hazeh? (Why is this night different from all other nights?) Okay give them a week's grace; they should know the words in time for the first seder. 

 

Number bonds and ten frames reinforced with accompanying stories and the children relaying their stories using props and counting: ' 7 and 3 make 10.' and '7 plus 3 equals 10.' This is followed up by games/activities and entries in their workbooks. 

We continue with parts of speech; adjectives, nouns and now, verbs.  We use the Montessori grammar symbols, sounding out nouns (written in black) and verbs (doing or action words) written in red. We read a big book holding up red whenever a verb was read; 'can you do it? / 'can you walk?' yes! 'Can you jump?' yes! 'Jump is a doing word'.' ... he smiled. 'Can you smile?' yes! Smile is a verb. (You get the idea ;)

In Keshet Science we continue with the 'Space' theme.  The kids have been having fun.  We talked at length about Jupiter and Saturn.  The children painted Juniper and added to their mobile.   Jupiter and Saturn were the focus this week.