Shofar shaping our lives

 This week being the last week before Rosh Hashana we prepared our honey dishes and learned more about the significance of the shofar. We looked at the shape of the shofar and saw how it starts small and gets larger at the end. This taught us how our small call to reach out to Hashem is so significant, and all the little steps with making the right choices and doing Mitzvos, Hashem brings us an abundant of Blessings. 

Our breathing of the week was the shape of the shofar, we inhaled by making a small circle around our mouths and then exhaled a great breath into the larger part of the Shofar. We focused this week on noticing sweet actions of our friends to each other, some friends brought toys from their home and shared it very graciously with everyone. 

Sand art shofar making.

Sand is a symbol of humility. when we are humble before Hashem we can look at everything we have and realize it is only because Hashem gave it to us.

Practicing our shofar blowing skills!

We have a lot of strong lungs in our class!

Learning the 3 different sounds of the Shofar we traced  and cut them with play-dough.

We've been working everyday this week on our Rosh Hashana Honey dish.

Making  honey muffins from scratch!

 We had a lot of helpful friends and teamwork to make these delicious muffins.

Rosh Hashana sponge art

We watched a video on how Shofars are made and the process after it comes off of the ram.

We hear 100 sounds of the Shofar on Rosh Hashana!

English Academics

Apple counting and cutting 1-10

Word Wednesday 

Rosh Hashanah fun

This week we have been reviewing all the beautiful lessons from Rosh Hashanah 

Our friends have been loving to practice dipping the apple in the honey and singing our Rosh Hashanah song. 

Nechama, working hard on her apple plate.

Doing a lot of SWEET mitzvahs and catching those moments were definitely the highlight of Rosh Hashanah unit and we will be carrying it on for the rest of the year!

Mendy and Yossi so excited to do the Mitzvah of tzitzis they broke out in dance!

Friends communicating and working together as they wrap up our honey cupcakes.

Axel enjoying the clean up process just as much as painting! 

Talking about a lot of Mitzvahs, we put a pomegranate on a morning center one day and invited our friends to paint. Some of our friends said "yummy a apple".

Instead of answering we gathered our class and opened an apple and a pomegranate for them to discover the difference on their own.

Delicious pomegranate seeds was a hit and a fun fine motor skill to try to get the seeds from the little hiding pouches.

Eli said he likes apples better and decided to show us and talk about it by our red play dough table.

Open ended Rosh Hashanah stamp art. 

We spoke a little more about the Shofar and our friends trying to draw one and Leah discovered she can erase it with her socks.

Learning about the different sounds of a Shofar. We placed different size tape representing the Tekiah- the long sound. Shevarim- the medium sound and Teruah- the many short sounds.

Our friends had fun driving and building on them.

Using our math skills while learning about the round Challah we eat on Rosh Hashanah. 

Yossi wanted to count how many chocolate chips he can get on his challah. 

We also sang many different math themed finger plays, using pretend money and round Challahs.

Axel wanted to show us a round Challah on the easel .

Getting really excited to take home our Rosh Hashanah projects!

Symbolic foods on Rosh Hashana

 On Rosh Hashana we have lots of yummy meals! It was very exciting for us to zoom into specific foods and learn the reason why we specifically eat it on this Yom Tov! We started off with the pomegranate fruit. These fruits have lots of seeds! The many seeds are symbolic of the many Mitzvos we strive to do in the new year! We had a fun math lesson counting all the seeds, and came up with 345! We all got to eat some seeds after our hard work of counting ;) 

Yakov counting the seeds

Our next food: Honey!

Honey is a fundamental food on this Holiday (Yom Tov) Our whole outlook of Hashem giving us a sweet new year comes from honey! 

We used bubble wrap to create the illusion of a real honeycomb 

We enjoyed seeing a real life honey comb! Thank you Morah Aroura for brining that in.

We tasted a bit of Rosh Hashana with apples dipped in honey :)

The head of the fish

This symbolizes how we all want to be leaders and a "head" in things. We want to lead with strength and good choices. This week we focused on friends making good and safe choices! We are all leaders!

Round Challah

It is a custom to eat round Challah on Rosh Hashana. We learn from its roundness that we are starting a new fresh year! A full year is a circle and we always have a new fresh start. We felt the smoothness and this connects to us wanting a good smooth year.

Making special "Shana Tova" (new year wishes) cards to send out!

Introducing the letter "Beis" 

We learned through using building blocks that a Beis is like a house but not yet ready to live in. We are missing a wall and a few other things to live in it.  This was compared to Hashem's home where we are constantly working and bringing light into it. He gave us the job to finish building the home, we do that by doing lots of Mitzvos!  Hashems home is in His heart where He ALWAYS thinks about us.

 Pretzel Breathing!

We have 2 lovely puppets named Mimi and Simi in our class that we use a lot. 

It inspired the children to make their very own puppets one day!

We had a special Mitzva to be apart of with Rabbi Lang putting back up our Mezuzos after they were checked which is a custom to do in the month of Elul!