Chanukah Celebration Week

Hello family and friends,

What a busy Chanukah week we have had in the Aalva class. Last week we made our menorahs out of clay and this week we were able to paint them since they dried over the weekend. I was so impressed by their attention to detail and how much time they spent painting their menorahs. As we painted we talked more about the characteristics of menorahs and what some of our menorahs at home looked like.

This week during Torah time with Morah Devorah we made latkes!! We talked about the general concepts of a recipe. We discussed different types of measurements and how combining ingredients creates a new substance. We discussed the importance of reading and following directions so that we get the correct result from our recipe. The kids really enjoyed adding the ingredients and following the directions as we read the recipe. After we added all the ingredients and stirred the mixture, we took the uncooked latkes to the kitchen for some volunteer parents from the elementary school to cook. Our final result was absolutely delicious!! We really enjoyed eating our latkes for snack.

Another fun thing we did this week was continuing to add Chanukah decorations to our classroom. Monday morning we brought out our classroom menorah. Every morning we have added a candle to our menorah and said the blessings as a class! Last week we put up the sun catchers, Chanukah banner, and Jewish flag. This week we decided to make dreidels and hang them from the ceiling!  As we decorated our dreidels we concluded that since they would be hanging it would be best to decorate both sides so that it could be seen from all directions. Everyone was SO excited to watch us hang their dreidels in the classroom. One day as the air conditioning came on, one student noticed that our dreidels were spinning! Everyone talked in amazement about how the dreidels spun just like they do when you played the game. It was a great way to talk to them about the wind blowing and how even though we cannot see wind we can see it move objects and we can feel it when the air blows around us.

The most exciting thing this week was definitely our Chanukah play, put on by all the Morahs. We practiced every day this week and I truly believe they did a great job today! I am so proud of all of their hard work. We even got to sit down and watch the entire school play and they did a magnificent job staying in their seats and showing respect to all the other classes by watching their performances. I hope you enjoyed seeing their performance. If you didn’t get to see it I have placed some pictures at the bottom. It was a little hard to get a good picture since the lights were off but I think they still turned out great.

Have a great weekend. Love,

Ms. Michelle

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
• Show curiosity in an increasing variety of actives, tasks, and learning centers.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
• Understand that a task can be accomplished through several steps

Social & Emotional:

• Stand up for rights much of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.

Language & Literacy:

• Retell one or two events from a story read aloud.
• Incorporate favorite parts of literacy texts into play activities.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.



 

Let's Celebrate Chanukah!

Hello family and friends!

We had a great week back from Thanksgiving break! The kids had so many stories to tell us about family and friends and food. As we say good bye to Thanksgiving, we shift our attention to Chanukah. This will be the focus of our classroom over the next couple of weeks. The kids have been asking questions about Chanukah and are ready to dive into it!

 As we focus on Chanukah, we've added several new elements to our classroom. In science, we have added a Chanukah exploration bag. In this bag we have put dreidels (and chips to play the game with), candles, and our classroom menorah. We've also added Chanukah books to our classroom library. We've even done some decorating! You'll find a Chanukah sign hanging up in our room and next week we will be making some of our own decorations to hang from the ceiling. The kids have been beyond excited about learning more about the holiday! We've been doing a lot of reading about the holiday and its history both in our large group setting and with Morah Devorah.

To start off our week, we introduced the kids to dreidels. We've been practicing our spinning and we're getting better by the day. We also introduced them to the game you play with dreidels. This was a fantastic way for us to focus on math as the game involves both added and taking away. While we were learning new math concepts and working with numbers, we were also learning Hebrew letters and playing the game we read about in our Chanukah books. It was a great day of making connections and focusing on our new math skills. We have a large collection of dreidels in our classroom, as well as directions of how to play the game. If you’d like to borrow any of this to play with at home, please let us know. We’d love for you and your child to play at home as well!

 As we’ve been discussing Chanukah, we’ve been putting a heavy focus on Jewish culture. We’ve been learning about the history of Chanukah and the Maccabee's as well as traditions of Jewish families. You’ll notice that we have hung the Jewish flag up in our classroom as well as made sun catchers to place in our windows. These sun catchers have the same symbol and colors as our Jewish flag. The kids used popsicle sticks to make these. They shaped and glued their sticks and then glued tissue paper on the back for light to shine through. As light is an important aspect of Chanukah, these sun catchers are a great reminder of the power and beauty of light. On a sunny day, these look beautiful in our windows! We hope it shows everyone who enters our classroom the value we place on the Jewish culture of our school. While we originally made these as part of our Chanukah decorations, we all decided that these should hang around well past Chanukah! And our flag is now permanent in our classroom…yay!

While we do have a classroom menorah that we will be using with candles next week, we thought it’d also be a good idea for the kids to make a menorah to use at home. We hope that what we model with our classroom menorah can be something the kids demonstrate with their own menorah at home. We used clay to shape our menorahs and poked holes in them for our candles. As we made these we spoke about the menorah, the different characteristics of it and how it is used. After these dry we will be painting them and letting the kids take them home. We were hoping to send them home Friday but it looks like we will have to wait until Monday as they are super thick and still wet. Each menorah will be sent home with a shamash candle (used to light all the other candles, the "helper" candle) for the children to light throughout the week. Make sure you give us feedback about how this goes at home! We can’t wait to hear how they apply what they’ve been learning.

Next week we will continue our learning of Chanukah and plan on doing some cooking. If any of you know how to make a traditional Jewish dish and want to come cook with us, we would love to have you teach us! I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!

Love, Ms. Rachael

Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
• Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questioning and adding ideas.
• Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
• Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.
• Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
• Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Organize and represent data with real objects.
• Represent simply tow-dimensional geometric shapes.
• Sort and classify objects by one attribute.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
• Count orally forward to twenty and backward from three.

 

 

Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel...

 

 

We love our sun catchers!...

 

 

Working hard on making our menorahs...

 

 

How many 4 year olds can we fit into the sandbox?!...

 

 

"This is Hashem in the sky. He sent down a lot of rain and Jonah got swallowed by a whale. See him in the whale's stomach?"

 

 

 

 

We are thankful!

It's been a great week in the Aalva class! With Thanksgiving approaching, we've been spending some time talking about the holiday and what it means to us. We started the week by asking the kids what they thought "thanksgiving" meant. Most of their answers were about food and playing. It opened the door for some great conversations about time spent with family and friends.

One of the main things we wanted to focus on through our study was the idea of being thankful. We discussed the definition of being "thankful" and agreed that it meant "to be glad you have something in your life". Our favorite book we read about being thankful was “Give Thanks for Each Day” by Steve Metzger. After reading and talking we decided that we tend to be thankful for the things we love and the things that mean the most to us. In order to discuss more about the things we were thankful for we decided to make a classroom thankful tree. First we went outside into the woods to find some branches. We knew that we wanted them to fit inside of a vase so as we walked around we discussed the size and shape of different branches. Once we got back into the classroom we began making our very own leaves to place on our tree. We had the students make leaves using stencils. After tracing whatever shape they chose, they cut them out, wrote a word to describe what they were thankful for, punched a hole in the paper and hung it up on the tree. We told the kids that they could add to our tree whenever they wanted to. Anytime they thought of another reason to be thankful, they could make a new leaf and hang it up. The kids have really been excited about this activity and have made everything by themselves! Their tree is sitting outside our classroom door. We also encourage you and your family to write down some things that you are thankful for. We want to open up the tree to the whole school and see how full we can get our tree!

We also had the opportunity of having a college student work in our classroom over the past two weeks. He spent some time making observations and playing with the kids, which they thoroughly enjoyed. For his course, he had to spend several hours with us and do a lesson for his final semester in school. He decided to do a science experiment with us...making a snow flake. Of course snow is an exciting event for those of us in South Carolina who rarely see it. He spoke with the kids about the seasons and changes that we see in each one. They spoke with him about transitioning from fall to winter. After some discussion, he demonstrated the science experiment and then had each child come do it themselves. To make a snowflake, they each made a unique shape with a pipe cleaner and hung it from a string. Next they placed their shape in a bucket containing warm water and Borax and let it sit for 24 hours. The next morning everyone was really excited to see what happened to their pipe cleaners. Unfortunately, the experiment did not work out. We spent some time talking to everyone about how not all experiments work out the way you want them to. I think we learned a lot from this outcome and I know the kids were still excited about the experiment even though it was a flop. Everyone talked about how it was just like being a real scientist and not knowing if it would work. Then they hypothesized about why it didn’t work and maybe some things we could do next time to make it work better.

With Chanukah approaching fast we have started talking about it during Torah time with Morah Devorah each morning. This week we read the book “If the Candles Could Speak, The Story of Chanukah” by Dassie Prus. We will be learning more about the significance of the holiday throughout the next several weeks. Each day Morah Devorah will come in and talk to us about different things we do during Chanukah. We have already been practicing with our dreidels and later on we will be making latkes, donuts, menorahs and so much more! Along with learning about Chanukah we will also be practicing for our Chanukah play which will be December 11^th. I can’t wait!!

Love,

Ms. Michelle  

 

Approaches to Learning:

• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps. 

Social & Emotional:

• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Show awareness and respond to feelings of others with adult guidance and support.
• Stand up for rights much of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud. 
• Begin to distinguish between real and make-believe in stories read aloud. 

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.

 

 

 

 

   

Today I Feel Silly!

Hello family and friends!

What a crazy week we have had! I felt like this week flew by as we were constantly hopping from one thing to the next. We had several activities this week that were outside of our normal routine so it was hard for us to sit down and refocus on a new exploration. I decided to take this time and focus on something we all experience...emotions. As you know from living with a 4 year old, they experience a lot of emotions in a day (as we all do). The beauty of a young child's emotions is that they hide nothing. As we experience different emotions in the classroom, we've been trying to talk through them. We've been trying to get each child to think about what caused their emotion, what support they need while they're feeling this way, and the appropriate way to deal with that emotion.

To start this week, we made a huge list of emotions. It was surprisingly long! Many of these emotions they listed were ones that I didn't expect them to have heard before. As we listed these emotions, we talked about them. We discussed situations that cause these different emotions and how we want to react when experiencing them. I also categorized these emotions into two groups: emotions that make us feel good and emotions that make us feel not so good. Throughout our conversation we learned that each of us has felt all these emotions at some point in our life and none of these emotions are "bad". They may not feel good at times but it's not bad for us to feel angry or grumpy...it's just part of how we deal with different situations. After a long (and surprisely in depth) conversation, we read a book about emotions. Their favorite book about emotions this week was "Today I Feel Silly: and other emotions that make my day" by Jamie Lee Curtis. Here is the list the kids came up with: sad, silly, crazy, happy, angry, frustrated, mad, sleepy, scared, quiet, excited, grumpy, joyful, confused, lonely, cranky.

In discussing how different emotions make us feel, we encouraged the kids to express these emotions through artwork. To get them started we talked about what different emotions look like by using colors. When I called out an emotion each child gave a color that they associated with that emotion. While some of the color results were different, the majority of them were the same...for example, most associated red with anger and blue with sad. From colors we moved to drawings. We spent journal time spread out around the room (we love to color on the floor) with our crayons drawing a picture of an emotion. The kids could pick any emotion they wanted and express it in any form they chose. We explained that these journal entries could reflect any emotion they've felt before in any way they felt best expressed that emotion. We turned some low volume classical music on and let them go to work. I was amazed. They put genuine time and effort behind their artwork. After everyone was done, we met back together to have a share time. We've seen them thinking about their emotions through their paintings as well. You'll notice several paintings around the room labeled with a simple emotion instead of sentences.

Speaking of artwork, we were able to work with a wonderful artist this week to make paintings for our annual Posh Nosh auction. The kids worked with him to make a class painting as well as contributing to a painting that was done by each student in the school. They didn't want this activitiy to end. I'm pretty sure they all felt like super kids using a fancy brush and painting on a huge piece of canvas with an artist. We're so proud of our class full of artist! Of course the painting it going to amazing...I can't wait to see it in January! As a reminder, our conferences will start on Monday. Feel free to sign up outside our classroom if you'd like to meet with us. I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!

Love,
Ms. Rachael

Approaches to Learning:

• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
• Demonstrate an increasing ability to follow through with tasks and activities.
• Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps. 
• Show ability to focus attention for increasing variety of chosen tasks and activities for short periods of time (10-20 minutes).
• Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.

Social & Emotional:

• Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
• Show awareness and respond to feelings of others with adult guidance and support.
• Stand up for rights much of the time.
• Describe characteristics of self and others. 
• Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.

Language & Literacy:

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Respond to elements of colorful language in stories and poetry. 
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud. 
• Begin to distinguish between real and make-believe in stories read aloud. 
• Relate information from texts to personal experience. 
• Make connections to prior knowledge, other texts, and the world in response to texts read aloud.

Mathematics:

• Use emergent mathematical knowledge as a problem-solving tool.
• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Begin to show an awareness of numbers in their environment.
• Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
• Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as". 

 

We are artists...

 

 

We are writers...

 

 

We are mathematicians...