Garinim

This week we welcomed the children back to school amidst some very warm (and often wet) weather! Ironically enough, our theme for this week has been winter, and despite the weather outside the classroom,, inside our classroom it has been a winter wonderland!

The children got creative with many different invitations for snow-themed artwork, including stamping snowflake shapes, painting “snowballs” using a cotton ball dipped into white paint, and creating a snowman collage with white cotton rounds, construction paper top hats, orange pipe cleaner noses, and brown pipe cleaner arms. Most children opted for a more ‘deconstructed’ look for their snowmen ;)

Some children enjoyed a counting activity using white pom pom ‘marshmallows’ and mugs of hot cocoa, counting out 1-4 marshmallows for each mug. 

Others enjoyed matching winter themed cards, or matching polar animals figurines to their pictures, in our language area. 

On Friday we not only enjoyed celebrating Shabbat together again for the first time in a couple of weeks, but we also got to celebrate Maya’s third birthday! Maya’s parents joined us for some yummy cupcakes along with our challah and grape juice—thank you so much, Maya!

Judaica:

We have been discussing the winter weather (haha) , snowflakes falling, snow people and icicles in both English and Hebrew.

It was our turn to make challah this week and our yeladim/children enjoyed the kneading process and making snakes to braid the challot.

Anafim

It was so wonderful to all be back together!  On Tuesday the children were so excited to not only change the month, but also change the year on our date board from 2022 to 2023.  This led to a whole discussion about the New Year and even some New Year’s traditions.  The children were quite intrigued when one child mentioned “the ball drop” which led to a whole conversation about what that means and what is done for that!  

This week we introduced the theme of winter, the only problem was that the weather did not get a copy of our school’s curriculum weeks, and has not given us seasonally appropriate weather (not that we are complaining!).  At least in the classroom we have been talking about what we can do in winter, looking at snowflake pictures, and talking so much about snowmen.  This week the letter sound “s” was introduced.  The children were all excited to see what was in the letter pouch for this sound.  

This week we introduced some food prep into our classroom.  Every day one child will help prepare snack for the class (based on our job chart), whether that be washing the vegetable/fruit, cutting it, or peeling it.  This is a great way for the children to be even more a part of making this classroom their own, give them some great life skills, and to do something for others!  The first to help out took so much pride in putting out snack for their friends. 

Some of the more popular activities in our room this week were cutting out the pieces of snowman from paper and gluing them together, using ice cubes to paint (holding an ice cube in your hand and as it melts dipping it into a watercolor tray and using that to paint), exploring the tens frame and looking at all the different number beads, sorting snowflake buttons by size and then counting them, and exploring the “s” sound pouch.

Friday we were joined in the chapel by Jasper’s mom and grandparents.  It was so lovely to be able to share our Shabbat celebration with them.  We sang and then listened to a telling of this weeks’ Parsha (bible portion).  This week the story was about Jacob’s 12 sons and telling them all how he saw his children.  Upon returning to our classroom we enjoyed challah, made by Alim, as well as lit the candles and drank the grape juice.  

Alim

Happy New Year everyone!!!!  This Week we blasted into Space. This Space Unit is very popular with the children.  We learned a fun Planet Song that the kids did solos on.  You can sing it with them at home.  

Planet Song-

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.  Hurrah…. Hurrah.

Mercury, Venus,  Earth and Mars… Hurrah… Hurrah.

Jupiter and Saturn are next in line..

Uranus and Neptune make EIGHT…

AND THEY all go revolving ……AROUND the SUN… BOOM  BOOM BOOM.  :)

There were a lot of Space activities throughout the classroom.  In Art, there was a marble planet painting work,  a moon cutting scissor work,  a planet worksheet to practice the sequence of the Planets.  On the Science shelf,  there was a space mobile to manipulate the planets going around the sun, planet puzzles,  a felt planet work that the kids explored the order of the planets and finally a fun picture- object matching planet work that involved 3D Planets.  

The children enjoyed pictures of themselves as astronauts displayed on our back wall.  Also, they have enjoyed all the Space books read to them during circle time.  

Music- Morah Dawn came into our classroom and did a fun sound shaker activity with the kids. She talked about time signatures with the children too.

We enjoyed our time in the Chapel on Friday.  Levi’s parents joined us.  There were lots of fun songs about Shabbat.  We enjoyed Morah Lana’s Pasha as usual.   Then we blessed the Challah in the classroom that we made and enjoyed eating it.   This weekend Momo’s family took the Shabbat Box home and we can't wait to read about Momo’s adventures with our classroom Fox “Shual”.  Have a great Weekend.

 

Keshet

 

Welcome to the new year!! We’re off to a good start - no time to rest.  

In math we are working on counting by 5’s - creating bundles of fives, making snowflakes using five strings per snowflake (I know, it’s been a warm week with no trace of a single snowflake,except for lots of our pretty snowflakes lined up on floor mats) and taking turns at the board to count by fives . 

Winter paintings this week reinforced the concept of filling the entire page with paint, and pretty winter colors of blue, white and purple used to create a beautiful background hue with trees in the foreground (or something like that ;) Some added splatters of white snowflakes. 

We are progressing with phonograms - this week with the sound ‘ai’ and the children are becoming quite good at sounding out as we create the words sound by sound.  They were eager to copy the words from the board, writing beautifully now. 

In science our unit on Space has begun, with information and creation of our biggest daytime star, the sun. We learned about the creation of the planets and spoke about gravity and the pull of the planets around the sun. This included cutting, coloring, pasting, and writing facts about the sun, which will ultimately form the center of their Solar System mobile. Start making space (no pun intended) for another large project to arrive home sometime in February. 

Oh, almost forgot… we started reading a chapter book, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, by Roald Dahl and despite some children stating they do not like chapter books because there are so few pictures, by the end of the first chapter they were enthralled. Ask your child to tell you about Charlie Bucket. 
See this week’s photos here https://photos.app.goo.gl/znYDvH4S9Xwj9FGw8