KB: Art Exploration!

Art Exploration

Painting, gluing, coloring, and cutting—Kitah Bet children eagerly take these supplies out of the art center.  “Let’s cut!” one child says to another as she gathers the basket of scissors and a stack of papers.  “I want to color!” says another child, pointing at the markers.  “Where’s the poster?” another inquires.  

At the beginning of the year, we offered art activities with a single medium, paint and brushes for example, so the children could learn the fine motor skills of holding art tools and using them constructively.  

Because we noticed that the children persisted at the art center, we began offering additional materials, such as scissors and cutting paper.  Dot stampers came out too and children smiled and pointed as they noticed how the dot painters splattered on their papers.

Now the art center is available throughout the day.  Children frequent it individually or even in pairs.  The pictures displayed here are the ongoing product of their art exploration.

An Environment of Yes

Intown Jewish Preschool provides a blended montessori and reggio learning experience, allowing the children's learning to be self led and oh, so special. Through our tray exploration, children create stories in small worlds, build with loose parts, explore their senses, and show us a thing or two about what we've provided for them to play with, there really are no limits when independence meets creativity.

Yonah happily builds towers of all different colors!

Mina is counting and placing the candles on the Menorah!

Asher's putting the blue circle into the fence and is pretending it's water!

Leora is showing us many ways to stack the colorful floor puzzle.

Adom is busy working on the construction site. 

Sela is focusing on putting together ALL of the shape puzzles. 

Parker likes to filter the fine sand through his hands. 

Orli can make lines, hand prints, and piles of sand over the light table. 

Mason prefers on giant mound and he can see more light!

Gavi make straight lines and says he's a construction worker!

Liav is figuring out how to build and stack with wooden blocks and triangles. 

So many different trays, so many different opportunities!

Asher's birdie is trying to stand on the branch!

Lily figured out the green rock is round and fuzzy!

Erez is staking the magnetic shapes on top of each other to make a tall tower. 

Lev is wrapping baby Moshe up safely. 

Elliot is finding jewels in the desert sand. 

Kitah Bet's Luxurious Spa Day for the Special Ladies in Our Lives

What do Kitah Bet students love more than their mommies?! Doing special things for them, of course! We have had lotion as a feature of our goodbye circle the entire year. This lotion has a calming scent to it that comes in handy during the part of the day where children are transitioning into either nap or carpool.  The children have always been drawn to this ritual and never seem to miss an opportunity to remind us when we try to skip over it when we run out of time.  Let's face it, Morahs are human, too :) 

We took this as an opportunity to create something, the lotion, that the children connect to, and tied it into our Ladies' Day celebration.  As we thought, the children ate it up, figuratively, of course!

Here, we introduced the ingredients: Coconut oil, beeswax (from bees!), Almond oil, shea butter, and the essential oils cedar wood, lavender, and citrus.  

Almond oil, beeswax pellets, coconut oil, shea butter

Lily didn't mind so much!

Yonah wasn't so sure about touching the beeswax

Leora said, "The beeswax feels like tofu nuggets!"

See how we mix them all together!

Then our special guests came to our classroom! We had a dance party, sang, "Be My Friend," decorated the containers and gave hand massages led by Morah Yael.