This week we have done many activities to get ready for the Rosh Hashana holiday! We painted a large shofar and apples at the easel, made bingo dotter shofar’s (where the children had to try to fill in the circles with a colored bingo dotter of their choice), an apple stamper collage, a tissue stuffed shofar, and their very own paper shofar to practice blowing!
We learned a new song!
“Dip the apples in the honey, say the bracha loud and clear! L’shana tovah, umetukah, for a happy, sweet new year!”
We learned that “tepuach” is apple in Hebrew. We practiced counting apples in Hebrew as well and we can get up to the number four!
Morah Sherri showed us tree pose in yoga, and we tried some Rosh Hashanah themed yoga... we are starting to get the hang of it!
Some favorite stories this week:
“Sammy Spider’s First Rosh Hashana”, “It’s Shofar Time”, and “You Are My Sunshine”.
We are very impressed with how the children are doing during our group meeting time. We have been practicing sitting on the rug and the children are enjoying our good morning song, as well as our weather song. They are also getting pretty good at the days of the week song—-ask them to sing it for you and I bet they can tell you what day comes next...

This week we continue to talk about Rosh Hashanah with an emphasis on traditions. We celebrated the birthday of the world through an interactive session where the children participated in “creating” the world day by day. We finished the week talking about how this is a special time to think about what we can do to be better for ourselves and others for the new year.

 

The week leading up to Rosh Hashanah ... we continued with stained glass effect collages, with the children's choice of pomegranate, apple or shofar.  We have apple counting games and activities, songs and dances.  Each child stitched a button onto a cloth and created a bee and apple Rosh Hashanah challah cover.  Maya's dad visited (Covid style - on the other side of the playground fence) and shared a little about the shofar and how it calls us to listen! We thought about things we can do better and heard the shofar being sounded; Tekiah, Teruah! Back inside we talked about the creation of the world as we picked items from the bag and added them to 'the world' - day by day as the story unfolded. 

We play acted Tashlich, a tradition on the first day of Rosh Hashana, where people go to a moving body of water and toss in breadcrumbs ('avairot'). The oval blue rug in our room serves as 'yum' (sea) and we threw our avairot (all the things we did that perhaps were not so good or kind) - the children searched deep, and shared - one said she would start cooking, and maybe do some cleaning! Another included a story of getting out of bed too many times in the middle of the night. Love the stories!  We're practicing our colors in Hebrew, working with colored constructive triangles - creating new shapes by joining two triangles, grading colors from darkest to lightest, exploring 'island' by filling the water area of the land and water form... We're practicing letter sounds (if you find yourself practicing these at home, please focus on the sounds rather than the name of the letter), ... Music class with Morah Dawn included clapping to the beat of the drum, and clapping and saying ' ta, titi, ta' as the cards are held up.  The children are learning to clap to music notation. 

 

Math- We played games with groups and sorting; sorted land and sea animals and charted the results.  This followed with a cutting and pasting activity - grouping animals and vehicles.  We are continuing with numbers - counting on; one child calls out a number and another counts on (ex. '5!' - another answers '6,7,8').  We are doing number bars, on the large dry erase board and individually with their own number bars, placing the objects as I tell a story. The objects are introduced as the children place them on their number bar and then I show how to use dots to represent the objects - working from concrete to abstract. 

 

Language- We're continuing with Charlotte's Web (recapping from where we left off and continuing on) - ask your child what's happening in the story.  Big books and grammar focus included the comma and capital letters where the children are called up to identify period, comma, spaces between words. The highlight is having me read the pages as if there were no spaces between the words.