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.
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