Our Purim Celebration!

Hello family and friends!

We have had such a fun week celebrating Purim. We spent the week learning the story of brave Esther who saved the Jewish people from Haman. We've spent time reading books about this story and discussing the importance of this holiday. We also turned our housekeeping center into a costume zone complete with crowns and masks of different Purim characters. We also disguised ourselves as different animals with masks and dress up clothes. The kids dressing in disguise is a Purim custom. It demonstrates the fact that the miracle of Purim was disguised in more natural methods as opposed to an obvious miracle (this is also why the kids wore costumes on Thursday). It was a great week of imaginative play!

We wanted to spend some time this week focusing on the four mitzvah of Purim. The first of these is Mishloach Manot. This is the giving of food to others. To demonstrate this we made our own baskets using paper plates and markers. After folding them into a triangle, we filled them with an apple and homemade hamantaschen that the kids made. After putting food in their baskets, they gave them to a friend in the classroom. As we made these exchanges, we talked about the importance of giving to others and being thankful for what we were given. We also gave extra Tzedakah this week as well as listened to the reading of the Megillah (both mitzvah). The kids made groggers (noise makers) that they shook when the name of Haman was read aloud. We really enjoyed this as the Megillah was read in Hebrew! Another mitzvah for Purim is having a festive meal together. While we didn't have an actual meal (other than our fun lunches), we did eat some special challah during this time (it had sprinkles...a big deal in this classroom!)

Throughout the week, we ended up talking about castles and what they might look like. We thought it would be fun to make our own castles. Each child drew a picture of a castle complete with plenty of details. Before we started drawing, we discussed what a castle might look like and the purposes of it's different features. We also found some pictures of real castles and studied what they were made of and their different shapes. After drawing our castles, we set out different types of building materials in stations. The kids went to work making a 3D versions of their castle. We encouraged them to take their artwork with them and use it as a guide as they constructed their castles. As we built, we discussed the different aspects of a castle such as motes and walls for protection. Here are some things they said about their castles while building...

Harry: "It has to be really dark in the castles rooms."
Max: "I have big legos to make a big castle."
Mariano: "I'm building stairs for my castle with legos."
Ethan: "I have snap-cubes to build a trap for the bad guys in my castle."
Shlomo: "I'm going to make a bouncy house castle."
Van: "I use snap-cubes to build a rainbow castle. It has a boulder on top to get the bad guys."
James: "I have blocks to build a bridge, rising water, and a tall slippery castle so bad guys can't get up. It's King Achashverosh's castle."
Taliah: "I'm using blocks and there is a circle to build up. There are trees and a tunnel to get in the castle."
Maddie: "I have legos to build a pretty cool window for my castle."
Sally: "I'm building purple and pink legos to make a table and I'm going to make rugs. My castle is a rainbow castle."
Kayla: "I use legos to build a porch and a tower and water."
Scarlett: "I used blocks for a castle. It has water and big roofs."

Of course the most exciting part of the week was Thursday (Purim). We loved all the costumes! They seemed to have a great time showing them off to us and their peers. We spent the morning in the synagogue listening to the Megillah reading and then got to play at the carnival. The older children in the school built games for us to play. Each game had an older student there to show the kids how to play and give out tickets. We let the kids wonder around the room playing all the games and when they were done they turned their tickets in for an awesome prize. The kids did a fantastic job with this! We also got to take a ride on a pony this year! I'm pretty sure this was the highlight of our week. Of course they loved it! It was a great experience for them and we are sending out a HUGE thank you to everyone who put it together! I feel that we all learned a lot this week - not just about Purim, but also about the Jewish culture. We took a lot of pictures this week, so I hope you enjoy them!

Love,
Ms. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Reason about events, relationships, or problems.
• Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
• Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
• Try to solve problems encountered in play.

Social & Emotional:

• Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.
• Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
• Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.
• Recognize own feelings and describe them some of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
• Distinguish between descriptions of story events and spoken words of characters.
• Retell one or tow events from a story read aloud.
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Recall some details in stories read aloud.
• Incorporate favorite parts of literary texts into play activities.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Locate patterns in the environment.
• Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Represent simple two-dimensional geometric shapes.
• Associate time concepts with a clock.

I have to start with these 2 pictures...seriously, how awesome/hilarious are these kids!

 

 

Making our groggers in preparation for Purim...

 
 
Preparing our Mishloach Manot for our friends...










 
 
We used our drawing and building skills to construct some awesome castles!






















 
 
Playing dress up in our classroom castle...







 
 
Listening to the reading of the Megillah and enjoying our carnival!...



















 
 
We rode a horse today!...




 































 


 
 

Chicken Varieties

Hello family and friends!

This week we spent a lot of time talking about the different varieties of chickens in our incubator. First we spent time looking up our chickens on the computer. We looked for images of eggs, chicks, hens, and roosters for each type of chicken egg we have in our incubator (Olive Egger, Easter Egger, Dominque, and Salman Favorelle). Once we found pictures of each type we printed them out and made a matching game. Everyone loved figuring out which images went together and finding similarities between the chicks, hens and roosters for each type.  After learning more about each variety of chicken we asked everyone what their favorite type of chicken was. Our goal is for everyone to learn more about the type of chicken they picked and when they hatch each child will be an expert on different types of chickens!

Wednesday Ms. Rachael and I decided it was time to check and see how our eggs were doing in the incubator. We decided to candle our eggs and get a glimpse at what is going on inside some of our eggs. We only checked three eggs, but of those three eggs they all had signs of chicks developing inside!! Now not all of our eggs will fully develop but it was great to see that something was happening. We are still counting down the days until they hatch and honestly I cannot wait until the 29^th gets here.

Thursday we did an “eggsperiment” or at least we tried...We tried to do the egg in a bottle experiment using a boiled egg, strips of folded paper, a glass bottle, and a match. Supposedly when you place a piece of paper in the bottle, drop the lighted match in and place the egg on top the egg will get sucked in to the bottle! Well we tried multiple times using different kinds of paper and I think we went through about 20 matches, but it didn’t work. This was probably because our bottle was a little too small. We used this experiment as a teaching point to explain that scientists often fail and that’s okay. Scientists keep trying to use different variables, which is what we did. After our experiment failed multiple times we hypothesized different things we might be able to do to make and it and we came up with some good theories. Even though it didn’t work out I know we all still had fun!

The Jewish holiday of Purim is next Thursday and we have been getting ready for the holiday in our class. This week we made Hamantaschen! First we watched a short video during Torah time with Morah Devorah on how to make the Purim treat. Then we set to work on making our cookies. Some of us chose to add jam and other chose to add chocolate to their cookies. We also started making our Mishloach Manot (Purim Gift Basket) to exchange with friends on Purim. On Purim we will dress-up in costumes, listen to the Megillah (story of Ester), exchange our Mishloach Manot, ride horses (yes, that’s right real horses!), and play carnival games made by the fifth graders!

 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:

• Use classroom materials responsibility, most 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.
• Display curiosity and interest in learning new words.

Mathematics:

• Generate conjectures based on personal experiences and simple reasoning.
• 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.

 Learning more about our different types of chickens...

Making Hamantaschen!

 

 

 

Our attempt at an experiment :)

 

 

We love this Spring weather!

Our Chicks Need A Coop

Hello family and friends!

I'm happy to announce that our second clutch of eggs arrived this week! We were so excited to get this process started again. We've spent a lot of time preparing for them. Even though they have a few more weeks until their hatch date, we felt like it was important to learn as much as we can about them so we'll be well prepared for their arrival! This group is scheduled to hatch around March 29th. We've been having trouble keeping our incubator temperature regulated this time for some reason, but we're still hopefully that we'll have some chicks by the end of the month!

When our eggs arrived we decided to spent a little extra time exploring them. Our previous group arrived at the end of the week and it was important for us to get them incubating so they wouldn't hatch over a weekend. Thankfully, this group arrived on a Monday so we were able to spend time checking them out before the incubating started. We laid out the eggs in a bowl and encouraged the kids to spend time that day looking at them. They were given magnifying glasses and paper for documentation. We were happy to find that our eggs were several different colors! We have brown, blue, green, and a light red/pink color. We were also given paperwork telling us the variety of chickens in our clutch. We currently have 5 Easter Egger chickens, 1 Olive Egg, 4 Dominique, and 4 Salmon Faverolle. That's a total of 14 eggs! The Easter Egger lays blue and light green eggs, the Olive Egger lays a darker olive green egg, and the other 2 varieties produced our brown and tan eggs. We'll be spending next week exploring those different varieties. Wouldn't we awesome if at least 1 of each variety hatched so we could explore them further?!

We've not only been studying chickens, but also eggs. We thought it would be fun to a do strength test with eggs. How strong were these things? Some of us were surprised to read that it's difficult for a chick to escape the egg. Many thought they were not strong (I'm guessing because it's so easy for us to crack them). To do this, we put down a square piece of clay and put one egg in each corner. We took guesses as to how many books we thought our eggs could hold. Most of us thought it would only be 1 or 2. We carefully took turns stacking books up one at a time on top of our eggs. We were amazed to get past 10, 20, 30 books...it took 70 books before our eggs cracked under the pressure! This activity had everyone on their toes. Every time a book was placed on our eggs, they just knew it would be the last one. We were impressed by the strength of those little eggs. It has given us a better idea of how hard it must be for a small chick to break out of something so strong.

The majority of our week was spent making a chicken coop for our new arrivals. We've been reading about chicken houses in some of our books and even found pictures online. We saw that coops are made out of a lot of different materials, mainly wood, plastic, and wire. We've also learned the importance of these homes. They serve to protect chickens from bad weather, protect them from other animals, and provide them with a safe place to sleep,nest and lay eggs. We thought our chicks might need a little coop of their own. This will be a great place for them to run around and play in. I wish you could have seen this in action. The kids got SO involved in this building activity. They looked through pictures for ideas and spent one morning brainstorming all their thoughts. After we had our ideas gathered, we went to work. We had tons of cardboard boxes (thank you for the donations!) and made sure our art center was loaded with supplies. We really just stepped back and let the kids go to work. This coop was designed by the kids and really all we did was give some guidance on where we might need tape to keep the walls upright. They did all the taping, folding, and decorating. I'm so impressed with not only their ideas, but their team work. They worked together to make a couch, TV, toilet, and even a back patio. Seriously, check out the back patio...they had that thing attached to the coop before I even realized that was an idea they had! This thing is their baby and I'm so proud of them! We are planning to keep it on display until our chicks arrive. After that we will make room for it in the classroom and allow the chicks to spend some time running around in it. Here were some of their brainstorming ideas:

Shlomo: a cage for the coop
Taliah: a fence and a dish for food and water after they play
Maddie: a hold in the roof for us to see inside and check on them
Sally: make it look like a barn
Rand: big open area for them to run around in
Scarlett: stickers to decorate the coop with
Kayla: a sign on our coop so everyone knows what it is
Van: a bed for the chicks with a blankets and pillows
William: keep the coop next to their cage so they can go back and forth
Max: a door and a roof
Ethan: put the cage under the coop

To finish our week, we concluded our egg experiment from last week. We noticed that our egg soaking in the water didn't change but our vinegar egg looked very different! There was no longer a hard shell and the color had changed to yellow. To test our experiment conclusion, we poked the egg and felt it in our hands. We noticed that even though there was no shell, it was soft and felt bouncy. We learned that the acid from the vinegar dissolved the calcium in the hard shell.

We're excited to learn more about our chicken varieties next week! I hope everyone enjoys their weekend!

Love,
Ms. Rachael


Approaches to Learning:

• Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
• 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.

Social & Emotional:

• Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
• Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
• Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.  
• Use classroom materials responsibly, most of the time.

Language & Literacy:

• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects
• Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
• Recall some details in stories read aloud.
• Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
• Explore books independently.
• Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
• Begin asking "how and why" questions when looking at texts.

Mathematics:

• Investigate solutions to simple problems.
• Locate patterns in the environment.
• Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
• Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
• Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
• Associate time concepts with a clock.

Exploring our eggs before we placed them in the incubator...

 

Studying the strength of eggs with books...

 

 

We are builders! Check out our awesome chicken coop...