I Am Special In Kitah Bet

Welcome to Kitah Bet,

The first few days of school have been wonderful!
They have been all about getting to know each other, connecting, getting comfortable in the classroom environment,  becoming familiar with the classroom routines, learning our Morah's and friend’s names, and most importantly playing, singing and having a great time together.

At IJP the children are viewed as collaborators: they are competent, curious, inquisitive, unique, and creative. To this end, we are starting their school year, and for many of the children their school career, with an exploration of the concept of self, with an All About Me unit.

Drawing Self-portraits  is a great way for children of all ages to explore the concept of self. It is something they will do on a monthly basis in Kitahs Gimmel & Daled. We decided to try our hands at it this week in Kitah Bet. There are many skills being acquired as your child creates their self-portrait. They are developing basic math skills such as shape recognition and understanding the part to whole relationship. They are naming facial features and learning color recognition.

Some conversations while drawing self portraits:
Yoni drew his self portrait and as he finished, he got up and went to the sign in board and took off the picture of himself and brought it to me saying "Yoni".

Morah L: "Shaya what color crayon would you like to use to draw your eyes?"
Shaya: "Blue"

Hannah drew on her self portrait and said "hair" then she drew some more and said "nose"

An invitation to draw: The center was set up with a mirror on a stand, paper and crayons.

The children loved looking at themselves in the mirror. 

 

We looked in the mirror identified each part of our face and then we drew

 .We noticed that everyone's face is different, well, almost everyone:

 These twins have faces that are identical! How cool.

Morah Leah

Mother's Day Celebrated

It was a few weeks ago, but not forgotten, what a joy we had at our Mothers Day Celebration in our classroom. 

First the moms and special guest arrived into our classroom. They recieved their gifts that we made for them, sharing our love of books and reading; a book mark! 

Then we sat at the table to makeflower arrangements to take home for our Shabbat table.  We also had some time to play with  tray activities with our moms.

We had a fun time playing our group game, "guess which quote your child commented about you". 

We went outside to play on the ship waiting for the rest of the school to come out .We sang our shabbat songs with the entire school onstage and ate yummy snacks that the children prepared.

We had a great day celebrating our moms.... graduation Day is next...Stay Tuned!!!   

Butterflies for Kitah Gimmel

Mazal Tov its 4 new butterflies born in Kitah Gimmel !!!

On Monday morning the children were so happy to see the butterflies that emerged from their chrysalis. 

 After snack we went outside to let the butterflies fly!

Some sweet comments flew around us like a butterfly:

They are going to look for their mommy,

They are going to have a play-date on a tree

They are going to look for nectar

They are exercising their wings

They are flying to the sun 

We will miss them!

Decorating for Shavuot

The students of extended day have been given the honor of creating props for our end of the year performance and the upcoming holiday, Shavuot. First, we built mini models of Har Sinai then we upscaled it to one giant mountain. Because the Isrealites found the mountain in full bloom, we decided to decorate the mountains with beautiful flowers of our own.  Painting the flowers was fun, but we really had a blast with the spray bottles outside. We hope you like our creation! 

Extended Day Buildings and Bugs!

During extended day we like to get creative, build structures, look for bugs (or create them).  All the while we talk about working together, taking turns, being kind to our friends, and are working toward an end of the year party.

Boxes can sometimes be more fun than the actual toys or items that come in them.  We explored this theory by breaking the boxes down and building our own little city.  With tape and a little teamwork we built our own little city.

Then we went outside to look for caterpillars.  They we scarce, so we made our own.  First we gathered twigs for our caterpillars to crawl on. Then we found some heavy duty wood glue, aligned some pom-poms, topped them off with some googly eyes and voila, we have caterpillars!