Animals Everywhere!

 

Hashem's amazing Animals!

After teaching the children about all the animals in Noah's Ark, and watching the children's interest peak --we decided to follow the children's lead, and expand the unit for another week! Giving them more time to explore, learn and appreciate these wonders of Hashem! 

 Animal center: new location for our circle time!

After observing the children's curiosity with the animals on Noah's Teiva last week, talking about the pictures they saw on the wall and floor, we felt it was now time to review and learn some of the names of the fascinating animals.

Role-playing different animals and the sounds they make.

Learning about different types of communication.

 

Giraffes eating from the tall tree

 

 

Block Animal Match.

Using two blocks, the children had to match up the correct bottom and top of the animal.

 

 

 

 

 

Great hand and eye coordination, getting the body of the animal to match in the correct position!

 

 

 

 Max wanted them to be standing up!

 

 

 

Animal magnets

Matching the parent animal to its baby.  Some children animated them to have them talk to each other.

 

 

Animal art expression 

By placing animals on a mirror surface it gave the children different dimensions and angles for them to draw.

 

 

 

 

 

Levi took his animal to a different mirror :)

 

 

 

Kosher animals

We learned this week that a kosher animal must have split hooves and  chew its cud. For our end of the week project we painted split hooves shoes to dress up with.

 

 

 

Experimenting with colors and mixing the paint to create different shades.

 

 

 

We headed outdoors to act like a kosher animal: chewing its cud 7 times! 

Shua demonstrating the split hooves

The Parsha/Animal Connection:

(While this concept is not necessarily a big idea of this weeks Torah Portion, there a times when we intentionally do not give the children a traditional lesson on the Parsha- as we feel it might be too much for the children to absorb in such a short time. Therefore we chose to connect the Portion to something the children are already familiar with and involved with at this time...hence the animal connection!)

This weeks Torah portion Lech Lecha we talk about how Avraham had so much faith in Hashem and left his hometown and walked to Israel- the promise land.

This was a great opportunity to connect the knowledge we learned on animals -- of how they walk and compare it to how us humans walk!

Everyone took their shoes and socks off to see our feet.

Was so much sensory fun for the children, (and for us) watching their reactions to putting their feet in paint and seeing their foot prints on the paper!)

With a hoof stamp we saw the difference between a foot print and an animal print. (One of the signs the Torah gives us for a Kosher animal is "split hooves."

Fun washing it off!

Classroom as our third teacher 

All areas in our classroom had different forms of animals. we never know how, when and what will strike a child's curiosity or expand their knowledge. For some it's when we formally have circle time for others by art and some while waiting on line to wash their hands!

Hence: our animal place markers on the floor---to line up for washing etc. 

We hope by providing different experiences that each child will walk away with more knowledge than before.

 

Chani was fascinated with the bunny on the floor.

 

Animal sound game

Different animal pictures were placed all around our classroom after hearing a sound of a certain animal they had to find the correct animal.

 

 

 

Animal Sensory

Play dough and popsicle sticks to create a zoo or a farm.

 

 

 

Tiger shaving cream.

We know the children love when we put out shaving cream! This time we added orange and black paint to it for them to create tiger stripes.

A picture of a jumping tiger was placed to get the visual and idea.

 

 

 

 

Max really wanted to paint the stripes ON the tiger!

 

 

Cow milking center

Hanging from our ceiling were gloves filled with watered down milk! This was for the children to experience milking the udders of a cow. With a tiny hole at the end and pictures in the table of what milking really looks like they each had fun filling their bucket with milk.

 

 

Team effort:

It was a lot of work --just like a real udder it takes time and patience to get the milk out. Here Levi and Aron worked together to get more out.

 

 

 

Zebra beading.

Black and white beads and pictures of Zebra's encouraged the children to work on their fine motor skills while discussing the beauty of a zebra

 

 

 

 

 

 

With one side taped on to the table, it helped the children not lose the end of their beads and know which side to place them on!

 

 

Fun in the sun

Sand is so therapeutic and its heartwarming to see the children melt into the sand and feel so comfortable!

 

 

 

Sand and water

 

Evi and Levi working on their Gross motor skills climbing and balancing

  

 

 

 

 

Devorah Leah "I am in a crib" 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raining in the Classroom!

 

Friends Re-connecting: 

After a long Holiday break it was so good to see friends reuniting! After updating our picture board the children began to discuss and remember what we were doing before our break.

 

 

long over due discussions happening ;)

 

We set up individual sensory trays with play dough, but on our first day back it seemed like the children came up with their own idea! Combine all the dough and make something BIG together!

Love how the children are able to work with each others ideas and cooperate to create something greater and more exciting!
 

 

Noach and the Ark 

This week we learned the story of Noach- which is the Torah portion of this week!
We took this opportunity while learning the story to explore what rain is and where it comes from.
 

 

 

 

Noach and his wife Naama (the righteous people of their generation) were warned by Hashem that there would be a big flood coming. Most of the people in the world were making not very good choices, so Hashem needed to clean the world!  

 

Noach worked really hard on the construction of a big boat called a "Teiva" (ark). This triggered memories for some of the children of the Sukkah construction!

Using a little spray bottle, we reenacted what it might of felt like when it started to rain.

 

We talked about the difference between rain and a FLOOD.

 

 

 

Hashem told Noach to gather every kind of animal into the Teiva! Sets of two for the non-kosher animals. Sets of seven for the Kosher animals.

We turned our block area to an animal haven.

 

 

 

 

This was a great area for the children to take what they learned at circle time and create their own Teivas, using their own creativity as to what they imagined it would have looked like.

 

 

Elizabeth re telling the story using the Naama puppet!

 

 

 

Rain

 

We used our sensory bin to teach the children how rain is formed! 

We placed two buckets: 

One with cotton balls to represent the 'clouds' 

the other with blue colored water, to represent the 'rain'

 

 

Using tweezers, the children "lifted a cloud" and placed it in the rain bucket. (this was the cloud filling itself with rain!)

 After that, they squeezed it-- to watch the rain coming from the cloud.

 

 

 

Working really hard on fine motor skills to pinch the tweezers while reaching to the bottom of the bucket

 

 

Aron proud of his little cloud and watched the drops falling down

 

 

Towards the end of the week  we switched our clouds for some recycled containers with tiny holes on the bottom.

This was a great way to create rain and add the sense of "hearing" to the learning! The dropping of the water through the containers created a sound like a rain storm!

It felt very therapeutic for some of the children.

Some children decided to add the animals to give them a 'bath'

 

 

Alongside our rain center we placed clouds on the easel (using a vertical angle) to help the children visualize how rain comes DOWN from clouds!

On top of a cardboard paper cotton balls were glued as the clouds. The children then used water droppers to squeeze the blue water on top of the cotton balls to create a rain storm.

The nice thing about this art was that through out the week we kept the same paper, allowing it to be a group project... friends added to it.... making it look quite neat with all the drops of water. 

 

Max felt so proud learning how to 'suck' in the water and letting it go at the right time.

 

 

 

Menucha commented, "very wet!"

 

 

 

With all the water talk Evi decided to take matters into his own hands!

He felt our sink needed to be fixed. ;) with observation he placed a small hallow tube and created a pipe to fill up a cup. Elizabeth was quite fascinated .

 

Rain inspired art

One morning we removed the rain pictures from our rain center and placed them on our art table to create some inspiration for the children to illustrate.

 

 

 

Levi decided to choose the bingo markers to make his rain.

 

 

 

Max after just coming back from a Thomas the train trip he connected the two experiences and told us he was making Thomas the train wet with rain. :)

 

 

Muka said her mommy was in the rain

 

 

Levi concentrating on his sticker art.