Pesach Comes Alive in KDH

Pesach Comes Alive in KDH

             

                      Enjoy these videos. Two were spontaneous, "Baby Moshe" was totally 

planned and produced by the children.

"Bang Bang Bang. Bang Your Hammer..."

"Oh Listen, Oh Listen, Oh Listen King Pharaoh..."

"Where is baby Moshe..."

We Love Our Playground!

No addition was unnoticed on our newly renovated playground this week.  The students took the afternoon Morahs around showing all of the exciting new features added to their already amazing outdoor learning area.  Some were fans of the flowers while others loved the bigger outdoor kitchen.  We had a great time exploring what felt like a brand new space and took full advantage of new learning experiences. 

"Look! We are a family making dinner together!"

"We can wash our hands and water the flowers at the same time!"

"Let's take turns picking up the rocks.  If you move one, you have to put it back then it's the next person's turn." After all of the rocks were taken from the pile, the students counted them then made their favorite shape! 

"We collected all of the rocks, now we're going to hide them in our wood building." 

KDH's Outdoor Classroom

The beautiful sunny day yesterday beckoned us outside. Not wanting to waste a precious moment of outdoor time, we all agreed to have our snack outdoors. Our plan was to eat on the stage on the bottom level. But once outside, we saw that the stage was still too wet to sit on. We walked up two levels and enjoyed our snack there. 

As we would say in the vernacular, "What mazel!" We were lucky to have gone up there.

Reyn found a lady bug. 

Lewis discovered an inch worm. What fun to watch how it arches its body to move.

And then, the pecans! Lots of pecans. We've seen pecans since the beginning of the school year. They were still in the outer husks and mostly black and rotten.

Yesterday the children found pecans just in the shell. They cracked them open and tasted them. What a pleasant surprise. 

They continued collecting them. Morah Sara went inside on got us a basket. 

We took the pecans and went down to the (now dry) stage. We lined up the pecans in rows of ten. We had 17 sets of pecans with ten in each set. The children counted by ten, obviously up to 170. 

What a fine day! We took the pecans inside and are thinking about what we can do with them.

Suggestions anyone?

Morah Ruth   Morah Sara

KDH Outdoor Fun with Math

This week's Parsha speaks about Yaakov and Eisav, twin brothers. Yes, twins, but very different, actually opposites. We listened to Morah Sara Carter's CD and sang along:

Yaakov and Eisav, 

Twins but Opposites.

Yaakov learned the Torah

Eisav ran away from it. 

The song goes on with a list of opposites, an important language concept. KDH children made a list too: hot and cold, big and small, fast and slow, up and down, inside and outside.... 

Twins are a pair, a math concept that we talk about. We also count by two's. KDH children love to count. We are always looking for ways to count and strengthen our math skills. Imagine our delight today as we watched and listened the children play outside.

They were playing Mr. Fox together, counting and running. After they stopped to catch their breath, they continued to count. 

At last count they were already in the 70's.
Keep on going, yeladim.  It's fantastic!

Morah Ruth and Morah Sara

A Bridge to KDH

From the first day of school,  we noticed the children of KDH  engaged in building bridges in our block area. We were excited to find something that engaged the children that we could explore together, so early in the year.

To foster this interest, we asked the children to bring in picture of bridges and put them up in our block area. We found a picture of Tashlich on the Brooklyn Bridge in the early 1900's. Then Elijah brought in a picture of his family on a bridge, saying Tashlich! Dovid is on the bridge in Piedmont Park,in his picture. Bridges are everywhere!

We read about bridges. Our favorite book so far is Let's Try it Out with Towers and Bridges by Seymour Simon. We liked the activities that Simon suggests. We built a human pyramid and learned about foundations. 

Can you build a strong bridge with blocks and paper? Yes,with arches and pleated paper. 

Don't forget Human bridges. That's us!!

How about working with straws and modeling clay to create buildings with strong foundations!

Micah's mom prepared and taught us how to make a plank bridge. Everyone painted planks (wide popsicle sticks), then we glued them onto long strips of balsa wood. Using the holes that Mrs. Linefsky drilled, we strung it up in our bridge corner. We can roll a spool across the bridge and look underneath to read our names!

Outside, we build bridges and enjoy playing on the wooden bridge.

This is just the beginning. 

We hope our parents will enjoy seeing the buildings on Parent night and we challenge you to build bridges too.

Morah Ruth   Morah Sara

Matzah Painting, Spring Nature Walk, and Pesach Jam Session - Kitah Alef

 Kitah Alef ventured out into the lovely spring air this week. We painted with brown paint and rollers to make "Matzot". Everyone enjoyed painting outside.

 Caleb and Annabelle made an extra painting outside. Annabelle: "I want pink!" Caleb: "I want red!"

 With the weather so nice we decided to go on a nature walk to see what we could find in the garden.

 The children found smooth pebbles. Sammy: "I put them in my pocket."

 We also found a rosemary bush. Morah Myriam: "Can you smell the rosemary?" Caleb: "I smell it!"

 Morah Myriam: "Should we take some back to the classroom?" Sammy: "Yes!"

There were yellow flowers. Caleb: "Yellow!"

 We brought some rosemary back to the classroom and everyone had a turn smelling it.

 Tehila, Evan, and Ezra watched us from inside the classroom. The children made faces at eachother through the window.

 On Wednesday we had a special treat. Evan's Daddy, Paul, came in to play his electric guitar for us! He even brought in his amplifier. The children danced and we sang "Where is Baby Moses", "Old McDonald", and "Let My People Go!"

The children each had a turn strumming the guitar. Morah Myriam (pointing to guitar) "What is this?" Ezra: "One, two, three..." Sammy: "It's red." Caleb (pointing to arm of guitar) "It's black!" Evan's Dad also sang us a song about everyone's shirts. "Tehila's shirt is green" (Tehila drums on her drum) "Sammy's t-shirt is wonder girl"  Morah Myriam: "What is your favorite song?" Caleb: "Ee Ay Oh!"