Gan Camarillo Preschool: Teshuvah is SWEET

Teshuvah means - לשוב לה׳ - To return, return to Hashem! This time of the year is the time that Hashem is "standing" with open arms for us to let go of our mistakes and return to him!

Our sages teach us the 4 steps of Teshuvah:

1 - Stop, I stop the oopsi and take a deep breath.
2 - Regret, I look back, and feel a little bit sad because the mistake I made.
3 - Say, I am sorry!
4 - Commit! I fix the mistake and think of a way that it won't happen again!

We had fun acting the steps out and placing them in the correct order!

Then, we watched Duvshanit, the bee, going through the steps of doing Teshuvah.

With this idea in mind, in one of the morning centers we painted canvases that were covered with tape.

The tape was showing us the mistakes we made this year. Nechama L peeling it off and revealing beautiful art. Just like when we do Teshuvah all the mistakes go away and we are left with the commitments and the ways to do better next time!

That's when Morah Hadar asked the kids, in their opinion which of the two is on a higher level - Never making any mistakes OR making mistakes, fixing them, and learning how to do better?

The kids answer unanimously that learning from our mistakes is on a higher level 💛

מקום שבעלי תשובה עומדין צדיקים גמורים אינם עומדין

Even the best people can't compare to those who learned from their mistakes!

We used water play to learn about the mitzvah of Tashlich - throw or drop. On Rosh Hashana we go to a body of water with fish, and drop all of our mistakes into the water.

Mordy, demonstrating how to empty every last of our pockets from our mistakes!

The fishies enjoyed them for a snack......

Using magna doodles to draw and erase, shows how with teshuva we can have a clean slate!

Working on a Rosh Hashana plate and placemats!

We had a fun visitor this week! Phoebe the beekeeper, who came to teach us how honey is made!

Phoebe said that one bee makes a 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime.

So, we role played as bees making honey for Rosh Hashana! With our teamwork we were able to make so much! While we work on making the honey we were singing a Teshuvah song!

(To the tune of "where is thumbkin")

Oops I'm sorry! x2

What did I do? x2

I didn't mean to hurt you,

I'm going to make it better!

I made a mistake,

I'll fix my mistake!

Doing math and working on our fine motor skills by counting and putting the chocolate chips on the circle challah!

Morah Rachel brought a book about sign language to class and is teaching us a new sign everyday!

The kids, cleaning the classroom together at clean up time!

Pre-k Kria

We practiced the letter Gimmel this week.

K- Kria

This week we started working on our syllables.

Jumping and learning!

Academics

Our class has been learning about the 5 senses. We utilized our sense of taste for a variety of foods, and recorded our observations.

At Circle Time we played the Mat Man game; reinforcing concepts of body awareness, size recognition, & placement/sequencing skills. Mat Man is also a great way to teach children how to draw a person!

Aftercare

TEAMWORK starts with a sense of belonging.

By taking turns, color sorting, problem solving and a lot of סַבְלָנוּת (patience)

These stem building activities are so much fun and are teaching the children hands on challenges to develop teamwork skills. Our young engineers are building a Classroom Community in aftercare.