Lights, Camera, Action!

This week in Kitah Daled Hey, we have been practicing and creating our very own play. Our skit is about a 15 minute long compilation of different songs from Annie, original versions of our favorite Star War's scenes, and even a joke show during intermission.
In just one week, our kids have been practicing hard, memorizing lines, and putting their all into their chosen parts. Each child is involved as much he or she wishes to be and was able to choose whichever role spoke to them.

While all that one student wanted to be was Assistant Director, helping ensure that the performance will run smoothly, another child got to fulfill her dream to play Annie, and another suggested the idea to add in a joke show.
It's been a wonder to see normally quiet and shy campers fully express themselves through the creativity in performing and helping to compose our very own original KDH production. The girls are passionately singing, dancing, and acting in our two chosen songs from Annie, "Hard Knock Life" and "Tomorrow". Every student has at least one joke of their choosing to share during our Joke Show intermission. And, the boys and a few girls star in Act II version of Star Wars.

Here is a behind-the-scenes clip during one of our practices!

The sense of importance and self-confidence shine brightly in the eyes of our young prodigies, as they wear their special costumes, contribute to the creation of the script, and diligently practice their lines.

An Invitation to Create

While wandering about our playground we became inspired to bring more nature, color and life into our classroom.  Nature provides everything we need to make paintbrushes with different textures, lengths, and patterns inspiring our budding artists to explore their creativity and imagination freely. Along with our handmade paintbrushes from the playground we collected day old flowers from Trader Joe's to explore even further the many ways to create art with natural materials. 

An open invitation to create: Blank paper, bundled rosemary brushes, exotic grasses, tree branches. 

Roses make the best stamps!

Creation station. 

Still art drawing.

Pedal pulling for our window art. 

Our finished collaborative wall: cut outs from the painted paper along with our paint brushes and flowers. 

Self-Portraits Using Loose Parts in KDH

This summer’s theme for camp is “Discovering the World Around Us- where young artists meet budding scientists”. In part of discovering the world, we need to discover OURSELVES! There is a saying in Judaism, “The world was created for ME!” That means that Hashem had each of us in mind when creating the world.

Here in KDH we spent our first week creating self-portraits using a little imagination and a lot of loose parts! Our kids are natural abstract artists and were able to create self-portraits with a ton of emotion and expression.

"I like it because I can make silly faces!" said one student.

 What are loose parts?
Loose parts are everyday materials such as stones, stumps, and boxes that can be adapted and manipulated in many ways.  Using loose parts encourages open-ended learning, creativity and imagination.  This allows children to create in any way they choose, without a specific set of directions and using everyday material.

 Throughout the summer, we hope to incorporate loose parts in more of our art and activities as we learn about nature and the world around us.  We look forward to an amazing summer!
Love, Morah Yael and Morah Jainea :)

Specialty Activities with Morah India

Every day we head up to the third building for our class's special activity slot with Morah India. She prepares a wide range of activities that touch on different skills. We've done gross motor exercises, cooperation and self-regulation games, and art experiences.

Yoga promoted awareness of our space, our bodies and our breathing.

Working together we shook a parachute, following Morah India's directions of stop and start. 

 We did some stretches and then followed Morah India through an obstacle course.

 

 Art and science were integrated in a tricky activity where we blew droplets of watercolors with straws to watch how they moved. We added drops of different colors to see what happened when the colors mixed together.

More creativity to come next week!

Summer Reading, Summer Fun

     It's official, summer is almost here.  We tucked our class' copy of It Looked Like Spilt Milk back in a book box, where we found it so many months ago.  Class is over, but reading never is.

     So, parents and friends, enjoy your child's copy of the book, and go visit the library (and the book boxes in your neighborhood!) to investigate so many other good stories.  This children of Kitah Gimmel were continuously clamoring for more and more books!  Fiction and non-fiction.  Old stories and new stories. Books during Circle, books at snack, and book at lunchtime . . .

     Enjoy the summer, the fun, the water-play and, of course,  the books!

Morah Susan, with Morah India and the Yeledim of Kitah Gimmel