A Day in The Life of KA/KB 9-1

 A Day in The Life of KA/KB 9-1

Now that we've had a chance on Curriculum Night to showcase our daily class activities and the skills they exercise, we wanted to highlight the areas that speak to each child.

Block/Slide Area

Max spends much of his play time in the block area stacking up anything he can get his hands on! With focused intent he stacks everything from sensory bottles to baskets to roly poly pumpkins, working through trial and error to execute his plan. He applies the same focus while connecting train tracks and  seeks out anything in the classroom he can use as a slope for his trains.

Block play builds strength in children’s fingers and hands, and improves eye-hand coordination. As they build, children will experiment with gravity, balance and geometry.

Our slide structure is a popular attraction, offering a safe opportunity to practice going up and down steps. Here children learn turn-taking and conflict resolution while navigating the constant flow of traffic. Nathan can often be found making circles up the stairs, down the slide and back again. The peek-a-boo window is a fun place to wave hi to friends and morahs, solidifying a safe, social connection.

Dramatic Play

What might look like just play in this area is actually your children learning invaluable life skills and learning to make sense of the world around them. They're building social skills while engaging in parallel or cooperative play, developing empathy by acting out nurturing behaviors, and developing their expressive language. This is ultimate nurturing of their imaginations. 

Sydney, Emmanuelle and Delilah delight in this truly imaginative play by spending time in the pretend kitchen. Whether it's celebrating Mommy's birthday, cooking food for their babies, driving to the grocery store or "eating" together at the table, they leave no detail untapped. Inspired by the recent birth of Morah Chaya's son Zev, a wealth of baby doll play has cropped up in this area. Sydney, Emmanuelle and Delilah often pretend they have a baby in their bellies, feed their babies and burp them vigorously when they finish. This nurturing behavior transfers to their younger peers as well; the way they show concern for the younger children, offering to help them or hold their hand displays the benefits of our mixed age group.

 

 

Manipulatives

This is the point in our day when we divide the class by age to offer skill-building materials that cater to each group. In the classroom, you can always find manipulatives available either on the table or on top of our shelf. 

Our kitchen area is where we host small group centers. Here the morahs spend time with the children individually, modeling the skills necessary for the activities and then allowing the children to use the materials as they wish. In true Reggio fashion, Micah and Elliott brought their fascination with ABC letters into our daily learning, pointing out the letters in signage around school and asking about the letters in their family member's names. In the classroom we put out foam letters for initial exposure. We took it to the next level by creating a tray filled with ABC rocks and name cards, allowing the children a tangible way to familiarize themselves with the alphabet, some children learning to match the letters of their names. All aspects of literacy—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—can be strengthened here. 

Benji loves all things transportation. Outside he makes a beeline to the dump trucks and cars, riding them around all surfaces and ramps on the playground. Inside he asks for the transportation puzzle and names each of the different vehicles and what sound they make.

Sensory Play

Children learn best using all five of their senses. Throughout the day we  offer multiple opportunities for sensory exploration sensory experiences provide open-ended opportunities where the process is more important than the product. When the children pour, spoon, grasp, they work on eye-hand coordination and motor development.

Sensory bags enable us to explore materials that we would otherwise not be able to offer safely at this age. Our window is the perfect place for our bags as the children can notice the changes in nature.

Sensory bottles tap into the sense of sound as the children experience with the different materials inside them. Jules is eager to explore the new bottles each time we change them out to reflect the current holiday or theme. She shakes them and offers them to her morahs and friends to engage them in the process of discovery. 

Playdough 

Our sensory table is another place where children can explore different textures with their hands and tools. Here they can engage in conversation with their friends about their findings, connecting even further to the topics discussed at circle time. Currently it is filled with dirt and hidden acorns and little pinecones for fall.

Art

Art is another time where we separate into groups of four or five at a time for maximum exploration. Rosie is the first to come running to the door to have a turn! She is eager to dive into the materials and experiments with everything that is made available. Art is a sensory experience, another chance to to explore different mediums in an open-ended setting. We offer brushes, pipettes, thick paint, watercolors, and even found items from outdoors.

Circle Time

Circle time is when we all join together and build our class family! We start our morning by singing "Who is Here Today?" followed by our Safe Keeper Ritual and Happy Flower. We recently added to our Alef Bet song by introducing each child's Hebrew name and first letter. The children eagerly await their turn to match their Hebrew letter to the corresponding chart. Once a week we have our Baby Doll Circle Time, when the children look forward to interacting lovingly with their baby dolls.

We hope to bridge the home-school gap as much as possible and make you a part of our classroom and the intentions behind our play and learning!

Morah Chaya and Morah Eze

IJPeek 👀

Welcome to our first school-wide blog! I am so happy to be back at IJP, catching snippets of your children's exploration and discovery with every step I take around the school. With all the exciting learning and growing going on in each class, I wanted to be your resident fly-on-the-wall and make sure you got the full scoop. Follow me as we dive into each class' unique investigations.

                                                                                                                                        ~ Rena

KA/KB 9-1, 9-3

The two youngest classes have jumped headlong into fall. Using the natural teaching materials provided by the great outdoors, the children are offered opportunities to explore their properties using as many senses as they can. Morahs have brought the outdoors in by collecting leaves, twigs and other found items to use in provocations.

KA/KB 9-1 used their natural fall materials in an open-ended shadow box activity. The morahs catered to the varying age-and skill-levels by presenting differentiated tools and mediums. Children could choose to squeeze glue bottles with two hands or use the daintier glue brush with which to attach their leaves. They could pinch pipettes filled with paint or pour the colors from small jars. With open-ended art experience like these, children employ creativity, problem-solving, muscle manipulation and receive multi-sensory exposure. As their brains mature, they also begin to develop a storyline behind their work.



In KA/KB 9-3, tiny fingers are building their muscle strength by engaging in fine motor table activities. Ordinary salad tongs become invaluable tools as the children grasp them with their whole hands to move large acorns from one spot to another in a recycled egg carton. Tweezers further zoom in on the smaller finger muscles to help children catch fall leaves to collect in a mason jar. These exercises are crucial prewriting skills and also develop hand-eye coordination. 

KG/KD 9-1
In KG/KD 9-1, the children are deep into some serious multidisciplinary learning. Letters, letters are everywhere - first the children followed their interests to pick the current letter of study - L! Fall leaf exploration is the perfect foil to examine the properties of straight-backed L. At the table, children have become familiarized with this lovely letter by tracing it, stamping inside it and gluing leaves. Look at those pencil grips! They have also stretched rubber bands to form the shape, a tricky fine motor exercise. On the rug, children move their bodies to form different letters, highlighting the first letters of their names. Giving children opportunities to experience a subject in varied ways speaks to the child's multiple intelligences, allowing him or her to personalize and better retain the information.

KG/KD-9-3
The children in KG/KD-9-3 have been fusing their interest in literacy with their creative and social-emotional skills by entering the rich world of  dramatic play. Within the framework theme of pirates and explorers, the group created their own apparel after researching the history of these famed characters. Then they dove into maps - how they're used to represent physical space and communicate that with the reader - and then did some map making of their own. Together they engaged in a scavenger hunt around the school to find objects that began with the same letter as their names. This is a great example of child-led learning: following the children's initial interests, the morahs built on their initial foundation to include a multitude of important life skills. Dramatic play strengthens children's interpersonal interactions as they negotiate roles and responsibility, and adding letter recognition and writing practice is a great way to incorporate literacy. Designing and following maps hones spatial awareness and meaning in print. 

KH
Kitah Hay also created a multidisciplinary experience by opening their very own cookie stall, "The Cookie Crust."  The children worked collaboratively to bake the cookies, create signs and slogans, and run the operations successfully. This project combined a plethora of important skills including math, social cooperation, literacy, creativity and life skills.

First, they worked together to make the cookie dough. Following recipes is a real-life application of sequencing, and also includes math skills as they implement fractions. More math was applied in the actual transaction - when customers came to purchase their cookies, cookie shop "employees" calculated the amount of change, and tallied up their earnings. Designing the signs tapped into the children's artistic expression and emphasized literacy as they agreed on a brand name and wrote the words themselves. They even dreamt up their own slogan: ‘Cookies make you happy!’ 

Stay tuned for more insights into the fun and learning happening every day at IJP!