Garinim

Our first full week of school in a long time was an exciting one!

 

The children have enjoyed all of the new fall colored and themed activities around the classroom this week, including fall leaves and pumpkins.

 

One extension on our practical life shelf that has been particularly interesting and challenging for the children is an extension of dry pouring. Many children have mastered pouring dry materials- such as lentils or beans- from one pitcher to another. This week they began to practice pouring from a pitcher into multiple containers, using multi colored corn kernels. At first they were all surprised when they went to pour and the first cup overflowed right away! We are continuing to work on the skill of visualizing when a cup is full and stopping before it spills over. Most of the children are very excited to keep practicing.

 

We are also learning some new songs for fall like “Leaves Are Falling Down” and “This Is The Way We Rake The Leaves,” where we pretend to rake up a big leaf pile and then jump in it!

 

On Friday we enjoyed celebrating Shabbat in the chapel with our friends and siblings from other classes, and this week saw the return of our Shabbat dance party, moving our bodies to some children’s Shabbat songs with fun colorful scarves!

 

As part of the Parshah Hashavuah we read the story of Noah’s Ark. The children had fun creating a Noah’s Ark art project. They made a free form project utilizing different shapes ie. glue sticks, semi circle, square and triangle to encourage their creativity of the ark! We used animal stickers which was the most fun!

We also have been discussing the parts of a tree/etz, leaves/alim, and branches/anafim in Hebrew and in English in celebration of autumn.

 

Anafim

What a wonderful, full week we had!  We started off the week celebrating Emma’s third birthday and enjoyed a visit from her parents and a special birthday cookie.  This week we continued on with our fall theme, and talked about pumpkins!  Many of us learned the Hebrew word for pumpkin, de’lahat, and some others learned the English word, pumpkin.  We looked at the life cycle of a pumpkin (seed- sprout- vine- flower- green pumpkin- orange pumpkin) and talked about how they grow.  We opened up a pumpkin and looked inside.  We found many seeds and everyone had the opportunity to reach in and dig out some seeds.  We then washed and dried out some of the seeds and will save them to plant in the spring.  We used pumpkins (and some other materials) for a science lesson on sinking and floating.  We loved gathering around a big container of water and watching as the styrofoam balls floated on the top of the water while the glass beads sank all the way down.  We then all predicted what we thought would happen with our two different sized pumpkins.  We then enjoyed dropping them into the water and many children were quite shocked to see that both pumpkins floated in the water.  We talked about why things float (how much air they are made of) and some ways to tell if other items might sink or float.  

 

This week we also spent time talking about this weeks parsha (bible story) Noah’s Ark.  We read a book about the story and discussed different details of it.  We then enjoyed other silly stories based on Noah’s ark for the remainder of the week.  We were quick to answer Morah Lana’s questions about the story in the chapel on Friday when she did a retelling of it as well.  Oh, this week we also got our very own kippa (head covering) to decorate which we will wear to the chapel every friday and when we do the Shabbat blessings back in the classroom.  The children delighted in picking and choosing the stickers they wanted to put on to customize theirs.  

 

Next week we will talk about Fire Safety and are so excited to meet Kevin and show him around our classroom. 

 

Alim

This week was fun and busy.  In the classroom there were new blue activities throughout Practical life and in Art.  We talked about how the color blue stands alone in color theory.  There were fun activities such as strainer work.  We had a fun gym class on Tuesday and Morah Dawn gave us a music lesson on Thursday.  There were new math materials introduced in the classroom called the Short bead chains, labeling the bead chains (theory of the square root) and then folding the chain to make a square. These include the ‘1 chain’ through ‘9 chain’.

 

Hebrew-

We discussed Noah’s Ark for the parsha this week.  The children listened to a few stories about this and some made an art project of Noah’s ark. We decorated our Kippahs for Friday Shabbat too.

 

Keshet

What a fun week!  A very busy fun week in Keshet. We started our ‘official’  journals this week and now instead of a single page of letter practice and a corresponding picture, we will write in our journal each day!  You won’t see the pages coming home each week, but will love receiving the completed journal (about four week’s worth of daily entries). Accompanying journal writing is a little personal dictionary, which is only written in by a teacher - the students find the page according to the first sound of the requested word and we look through the list to see if we can find the word and if not, the teacher will hand write the word for the student to copy. Our sight word list, posted on our classroom board, will be ongoing and so far we added the words ‘the’ and ‘my’. These Keshet kids are doing such amazing work - so proud of them!  

 

In math we continue in our work books and we also introduced number bonds, which will be a regular practice.  We set up a 6-pin bowling style game (6 little paint bottles and a beanbag) and with ‘6’ written in the biggest bubble, made components of 6 according to the number of bottles knocked over and those remaining.  The students enjoyed working with their clipboards, recording the results as they took their turn. 

 

We are learning about North America, mostly USA, Canada and Mexico; sharing pictures, telling stories and coloring the flags. 

 

Wednesday was the start of a new Hebrew month - Cheshvan, celebrated with rain clouds, misty mornings - just as ordered when we shook the lulav on Sukkot and asked for rain! 

The parsha this week is Noah and the Ark and we enjoyed reading stories, making collages and retelling the story with props on Friday morning in the Chapel.  It was wonderful seeing so many faces filling the Chapel and we welcomed some parents too! 

 

See this week’s photos here https://photos.app.goo.gl/8n9EUfrH9ubKYHtb8