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?"