Get On the Boat!

 

We sail the high seas pretty regularly in Extended Day.

Overheard:
"Let's go to the beach!"
"No, let's go somewhere more fun."
"Okay, let's go to Alpharetta!"
(All) "YEAHHH!"

This Friday we had a very special visitor to our classroom.  Our very own Eden's mom- Janine, who is a Veterinarian.  Animals are very exciting to children, and when we were speaking about the animals being saved from the flood, and living with Noah in the Teyva, we could see just how passionate many of our children were about animals and their care.  How wonderful to have a mom of one of our friends come and share her work with us. Making a strong connection between our interests, a friend and her mom. 

 The children started out by sitting together and discussing the needs of a cat? Jonah said a cat needs food,Eden said water,  and interestingly enough Janine said, they need a house and love.  

Janine then introduced biscuit and Quinoa to the children what excitement! 

The children  showed excitement when the cat was jumping up for the keys, laughing aloud.

A chance for everyone to pet the cats- even those fearful get a chance in a safe environment to be brave.

 

Thank you Janine for your visit! 

By Morah Estee

Kids in Motion!

Our class's favorite CD is Greg & Steve's "Kids in Motion."

Pre-Shabbos Treats

In my house growing up, we had something called "pre-Shabbos treats." I am not sure if this was something done in other households, or just a ploy by my parents to get us to clean our rooms before Shabbat, but what it meant was that in the midst of the wild rush to get everything ready before Shabbat, my four older siblings and I were allowed one special treat that we didn't normally get during the week. This was so tied in with my childhood Shabbat experience, that I am fairly certain I believed it was an actual law of observing Shabbat. As time-honored and sacred a tradition as lighting the candles or saying the kiddush, was having a fudgsicle before inviting the Shabbos Queen into our home.

From my perspective many years later, what a brilliant strategy on my parents part to give us a positive association with Shabbat! Who doesn't love a pre-Shabbos treat??

All traditions start somewhere...and I am bringing "pre-Shabbos treats" straight to Kitah Alef Bet! (But with a healthier twist ;-)

We blended DELICIOUS fruit smoothies, sang spirited Shabbat tunes, and welcomed in Shabbat with smiles on our faces.

(Recipe after the pics!)

Watching the fruits get blended

 Kitah Alef Bet's Totally Awesome Smoothies

2 cups apple juice
1 cup frozen bananas
1 cup frozen strawberries
1 cup frozen blueberries

Blend until smooth, enjoy!

Sinking and Floating

The water of the flood/mabul made us think about sinking and floating.  Monday morning was warm and sunny. We took a sensory bin outside and filled it with water. We gathered together: acorns, a marble, coins, a ball of silver foil, a feather, a cork, paper clip, wood chips, rocks, bottle tops. The children hypothesized which items would sink or float. We dropped the items into the water and watched if they floated or sank. Some things both floated and sank. The bottle caps floated when we were careful not to get water in them as we dropped them into the water. When water got into them, they sank. The coins sank. How could we put more coins in the water and keep them from sinking? We crafted a boat from silver foil and dropped coins into it. After counting 100 coins the boat was still floating. That was a lot of pennies and counting! We took the bag of coins and just dropped the rest into the boat. Whoops, the boat capsized. When we finished the experiment the children took watering “cans” and filled them up and watered the garden.

After we came inside we made a chart of sinking and floating items. This was fun. We should do it again.

Blocks in Kitah Gimmel

Kitah Gimmel playing with blocks

Read blog post below called Blocks Blocks Blocks

Noach’s Teyvah/Ark, Math and Autumn – How are they connected?

How could KDH children visualize the length of Noah’s Ark? 

It was 300 amot, approximately 600 feet long. 

At circle time, we started with a 12” ruler and yarn. We wrapped yarn around the ruler, up and down 100 times, until we had 100 feet of yarn.

To keep the yarn from getting tangled we wrapped it around a puppet. The children found that intriguing, On Friday morning we took the puppet and yarn and walked in front of the school. Morah Chana held onto the end of the yarn and the children followed Morah Ruth up the block as we unrolled the yarn. We had passed four houses. We estimated that every four houses is about 100 feet. We knew we needed to walk another 500 feet to reach 600 feet. That would be walking past twenty more houses, four houses/one hundred feet times five. The children were very excited to keep walking up the block. We walked and walked and at 600 feet reached almost the top of Cooledge Avenue. That was a HUGE teyvah/ark!  We counted our steps on the way back to school and counted over 300 steps.

Not ones to miss any opportunity, the children stopped in front of one house and collected small acorns and put them in a jar in our classroom. On Monday morning, we looked at the jar and the children guessed how many acorns we had collected. We spilled them out onto the carpet and arranged them in piles of five acorns each. We then counted by five. We had collected 138 acorns! 

By Morah Ruth - KDH

Blocks Blocks Blocks

 Building with Blocks
 There's so much going on in the block corner that it's easy to understand why it is often the most popular area in the preschool classroom. Often boys dominate the area, making it difficult for girls  to enter. One study suggests that if a teacher positions herself in the block corner for part of the day, girls are more likely to enter and use the area.
    Building with blocks is lots of fun--and it teaches many skills that children will use later. One study indicates that many of the concepts learned from block building are the foundation for more advanced science comprehension. For example, a child learns about gravity, stability, weight, balance, and systems from building with blocks. Through trial and error, she learns inductive thinking, discovery, the properties of matter, and the interaction of forces. One researcher suggested that one reason you see fewer girls in advanced placement physics classes in high school is because they are excluded (unintentionally) from many of the "play" activities that build scientific framework.  In our class we are sure to provide these experiences and include both the boys and girls in a meaningful and complete way.
   What's Learned? Blocks help children learn scientific, mathematical, art, social studies, and language concepts; use small-motor skills; and foster competence and self-esteem. Building with blocks also teaches life skills. Just putting away your groceries in the cupboard is using the same concepts of spatial relations, stability, and balance that you learned in the block corner.
   Besides the scientific concepts discussed in the previous paragraph, blocks also are important in developing math skills. A child learns about depth, width, height, length, measurement, volume, area, classification, shape, symmetry, mapping, equality (same as), and inequality (more than, less than)--all from building with blocks.
    Building with blocks also teaches art concepts such as patterns, symmetry, and balance. A child learns about symbolic representation, interdependence of people, mapping, grids, patterns, people and their work. A child gains pre-reading skills such as shape recognition, differentiation of shapes, size relations. Language is enhanced as children talk about how to build, what they built, what is its function or ask questions about concepts or directions. And dramatic play is also a part of block building as children create stories to go along with their constructions.
    Finally, building with blocks fosters a feeling of competence, teaches cooperation and respect for the work of others, encourages autonomy and initiative.
    It's not just building with blocks that is educational--so is cleanup. Sorting and storing blocks teaches classification and one-to-one correspondence, which are important math skills.

Self Portraits

Each month at IJP the children draw self portraits. 

It is always interesting and exciting to see the progress the children make in their fine motor skills, drawing and self awareness. 

In Kitah Daled-Hey we use different mediums as we try to give the children as many experiences as possible. Usually the children look in the mirror and draw their portraits. 

In September the children used Sharpies to draw their portraits. This month as we built on those skills, we did something with a little twist. We did not take out the mirrors. Instead, photographs were put into sheet protectors. The children used black sharpies to draw the outlines and then filled in with color sharpies. 

When they were finished, the photograph was removed and replaced with light blue paper as a background to the drawing.  All we can say is, “Wow!”

By Morah Ruth - KDH 

"Look Morah! My tree is balancing!"

"L" is for Leaves falling off the trees....Graphing leaves in Kittah Gimmel.

Morah stood tall like a tree waving in the breeze and many leaves fell to the ground all around. We pretended to rake them up into piles while noticing all the beautiful fall colors. There were green, yellow, orange, red, and pink leaves. 

Morah wrote the names of each color on the dry erase board, and each child had a turn to come up and match the leaves to the appropriate column. 

As the children continued to add their leaves to the graph, we compared the numbers of leaves in each column.. We discussed which column had the most  leaves and which had the least.

Finally, we estimated the total number of leaves on the dry erase board and then we counted all the leaves to determine the actual number of leaves that were on the board…29! 

The children seemed to easily grasp the concept of graphing. Morah introduced some new math terms as we graphed our leaves- column, row, least, most, middle, estimate, actual and compare.

Looking forward to see where this leaf exploration will take us next.