Lag Ba'Omer: It Makes a lot of Cents

This week we focused on the story of Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva was a simple shepherd, he didn't even know how to read. He and his wife were very poor. His wife Rochel encouraged him to go to Yeshiva (school) and learn Torah. 

One of the lessons we learn from the story of Rabbi Akiva is to never give up. Rabbi Akiva was 40 years old and he did not even know the Alef Beis or how to read. One day Rabbi Akiva saw a rock with a hole in it. He looked up and saw a small stream of water dripping on the rock. He realized that the dripping water made the hole inside the rock. He thought that if water can slowly break at the rock and after many years make a hole, he should never give up on learning and eventually he will be able to learn Torah, even if he is 40 years old. 

We used 40 fingers to count to 40.

Another idea we learned this week is that we don't need to know everything in order to become a teacher. If we know א we can teach א.

This week we invited Rabbi Akiva to learn with us. He was fascinated to see a 5-year-old teach him the Alef Beis and a 6-year-old teach him how to read.

It was unbelievable!!

After learning for 24 year, Rabbi Akiva came back home with 24,000 students.

Dovi: "24,000 is more than 11". In our class we have 11 students.

Rabbi Akiva's student loved learning Torah but didn't know how to respect each other.

This was very sad... on the days between Pesach and Lag BaOmer the students of Rabbi Akiva got sick and passed away. 

From the story of Rabbi Akiva's students we learnt how important it is to respect each other.  In our class Morah Avigayil wanted our students to understand how the students of Rabbi Akiva disrespected one another. 

The Morah called two students to look through the toilet paper roll. One from each side. 

Evan and Faiga had to share with the rest of the class what they saw. 

Evan said that he saw a yellow paper and Faiga said that she saw an orange paper. 

This was confusing for both of them and they started to argue with each other... "no it's orange, no its yellow..."

Until Motty said "they ⁷are both right, Evan can see yellow and Faiga can see orange!"

Motty was right, all of the students of Rabbi Akiva were right, they each had a different point of view and a different way of thinking but they were not able to discuss it in a respectful way with each other.

Money Matters

It's never to early to start learning about coins and money! We watched a video about the different types of coins.

A quarter is equal to 25 pennies.

Mendel and Dovi checked out their tzedaka coins to see what kind they were.

Sorting the different types of coins

Making Cents of it all.

After finishing our good behavior "shell jar" we got to put our coin sense to use in

this fun "fruit kebab " store.

We each got some quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies and had to buy the fruit for our kebabs.

We love fun and educational prizes!

Using clay to color, is a great sensory art!

Motty creates his name with clay.

Aleph- Bais Backwards Pictionary

listen to the instructions and try to figure out what letter you're drawing.

Threading the right number of beads on the flower! A great fine- motor activity, to strengthen our hand muscles.

Mendel creates a clay art picture.

I spy games, using a recent book donation are so fun!

A 40 year old student?

In preparation for Lag B'omer we learned about the famous sage, Rabbi Akiva whose passing, this day commemorates. Click here for more about Lag BaOmer

We chose a portion of his life story  to focus on with the children. How he went from not knowing much Torah as an adult, to becoming a most sought after Rabbi.  Our main goal this week was to show the children how even though he was a grown man- he started with learning Alef Beis in a preschool setting-- NEVER GIVING UP!

A Rabbi Akiva puppet joined our circle time this week to learn with us just like he did many years ago.

Teaching Rabbi Akiva the Alef Beis by circle time!

We spent a whole week creating many different Alef Beis experiences.

We are intentional at Gan Camarillo Preschool not to place  a heavy emphasis on letter recognition at this young age, because we believe there are far more developmentally appropriate goals to focus on- such as the soft skills of self control, conflict resolution, daily living (self help skills) and ensuring their sensory needs are met all around. Much research has been done in this area, and the results have shown that when the focus is on a playbased/sensory rich setting- it lays a stronger foundation for academic success (with reading etc..) when introduced at a later age.

Moshe and Yanky matching bottle caps with Hebrew letters to the chart.

Decorating the Alef with 'Adom'- red.

Chanie using water to practice tracing the Hebrew letters.

The Hebrew letter 'twins'. Beis and Veis one with a dot and without. We placed bean bags to encourage our friends to try to get it on the dot of the Beis. Sholom was excited to use his ball from home to bounce it in the Beis.

 Adelle "Beis has a belly button." Decorating buttons on the letter 'Beis'.

Emma practicing the vvv sound by placing Velcro on the letter 'veis'.

As we talked about different Veis sounds, volcanos came up and we watched what a real volcano looks like inside our taped Veis on the carpet.

Batya was quite fascinated with the black lines of the letter Hey bleeding as she water painted.

Sensory Hebrew letter fun. We placed popsicle sticks to help practice the shape of the letters however fingers were definitely more fun;)

Hebrew blocks on top of the Hebrew letter gimmel. Adelle worked very hard to line up her blocks to make a gimmel.

 Mendel making the letter vav with marbles in his play dough.

Eli found some letters in his name and was quite excited about it.

Arik practicing with a car the shape of the letter Hey.

We can learn a great lesson from Rabbi Akiva, to never give up! 

We asked our friends what they wish they knew how to do that still cant.

Emma, "I want to cook like my mommy."

We encouraged her to ask her mommy if she can help her to keep practicing her cooking skills.

Mendel, "To climb like my brother Yehuda."

Even if we cant fulfill these dreams yet we can still keep trying!

Parshat Kedoshim: Squeezing It All In

We started the week by inviting the children to participate in an interesting activity:

''You may look at yourself  in the mirror and draw yourself or you may look at yourself in the mirror and draw something else. If you choose to draw yourself you get to share it with your classmates at circle time or if you choose to draw something else you do not get to share it with your classmates''.

Rozie and Evan are looking at the mirror and drawing themselves.

 

These choices are similar to the choices we have in how to live our life. We get to choose how we will live our life! "If you follow the Torah and its Mitzvahs, then you will be holy."

The name of this week's Parsha is Kedoshim. The word Kedoshim means holy. In our class the Morah gave an example of the relationship between Hashem and us the Jewish people.

The Morah used a mirror for the example. The mirror is the Torah that Hashem gave us. Hashem gave us the Torah as a tool and we have the choice to follow it and be holy or to not to.... and in this weeks Parsha a lot of Mitzvos are squeezed in.

The Torah tells us how bad it is to speak Leah Hara.
What happens when a person speak Lashon Hara?

Toothpaste Teaches Us

We did a cool experiment to show what happens when someone speaks Lashon Hara.
Each child got a toothpaste tube and had to squeeze out the paste onto a plate. Once the toothpaste was on the plate the children had to figure out how to put it all back into the tube the way it was before it was opened!

                                       

At first they all got excited to figure this out. Then some children said this is impossible. There was one child that started to cry and gave up. The Morah's kept on cheering the children and gave them tools like spoons and popsicle sticks...
We let them try for a couple of minutes to see if some of them were able to put in the toothpaste back into the tube.

In class we spoke about what kind of injury a person gets when someone spoke Lashon Hara about him. Is it a visible injury?
No, its an invisible injury!  So how can we fix an invisible injury?
It is very hard to fix it, the same way it was very hard to pour the toothpaste back into the tube.

Scientists At Work

Creating a cloud in a jar!

We watched the "rain" trickle through the shaving cream "clouds" 

and hypothesized what was going to happen!

*ask your child* 

What does hypothesis mean?

 

Domino Addition Matching!

Finding the domino that matches the addition problem.

Motty's mommy came in to share a story with the class!

Thank you for reading us a story!

Malka and Rozie chose and cut flowers to dry for our Mother's day Project.

 

Yisroel shared his trip newsletter with all his friends

This week we started to learn about time. Being on time is important. 

Saige is telling us the time.

Rozie, Dovi and Bela Riva are searching for the Hebrew letters of their name.

Faiga helps paint the large rock! Our challenge was to fill it up with "Z"s

Menachem adds the right number of stripes to his zebra.

Evan finds a number that ends with a zero.

Numbers that end with zero, can all be counted by 10.

We are practicing counting by 10.