I feel like it's been awhile since I've been on our blog! As I mentioned before, on our short weeks, I usually send out an email with a recap of our week and a few pictures. Since we were at school most of this week, I thought I'd jump on and give you an update of all the fun we've been having! I hope all of our Jewish families have had restful and meaningful holidays so far.
Since the month of October involves several "home days" and is full of Jewish holidays, we took a little break from our normal explorations. It's been an awesome time for us to talk about these important holidays and spend some time learning about our new interests. One morning, a student started telling everyone about a new topic that they were interested in...mushrooms. This started a whole conversation about new interests. We decided that we would pull our chart down and make some updates. We added a lot of topics! We'll be taking a vote soon and dive into something new. Here are some things that the kids are currently interested in...
Audrey: mushrooms
Yael: clocks
Adam: watermelons
Sylvia: raspberries
Emma: flags
Ellie: grass
Callie: dirt
Sophia: yarn and how it's made
Paxton: rocket ships
Harley: princesses
Yishai: helicopters
Oscar: railroad trains
Grady: butterflies
Just because we haven't started a new exploration, doesn't mean we haven't been crazy busy! We've been spending a lot of time during Torah Time and in our classroom talking about the different Jewish holidays. We've been discussing what these holidays are, why they're important, and how they are celebrated. One of the holidays coming up is Sukkot. We spent some time this week making our own sukkahs in the classroom! The kids came up with this idea while we were on the playground. A man came by and was trimming the bushes while we were out there. They were following behind him picking up everything that dropped to the ground. They then ran over and asked if we could take these inside and use them to make our own sukkahs. These kids are geniuses! We gave the kids complete control of this activity. Some chose not to make one, while others moved around the room using all different types of materials. They used wooden blocks, legos, egg cartons, yarn, nature objects, just about everything. They were so proud of these! This was a great way for us to talk about the holiday as we played. Next week, we will be eating snack in a real sukkah provided by the synagogue!
We also spent one day doing a science experiment. We made pumpkin slime and the kids went crazy! This is basically a mixture of glue, hot water, liquid starch (or Borax), food coloring, and we used some pumpkin pie spice to add a fun smell. When the starch mixture meets the glue, it instantly becomes a wet, slimy mess. We let the kids do all the mixing and stirring. Once it started to turn into slim, they used their hands to knead everything together. The final product turns into a stretchy, smooth type of "slim", that thankfully doesn't stick to tables! We hope your kids enjoyed it at home as much as they did at school. It was so much fun to watch their expressions as the slime began to form. I tried to capture it on camera the best I could...enjoy :)
We have become quit the little collectors of nature lately! Our centers are quickly filling up with leaves, sticks, rocks, grass, pine cones, and all types of pretty nature. We decided to do some painting with pieces of nature brought into the classroom. We used things such as pine cones, grass, rocks, and leaves. We taped each objects onto a big stick and let the kids paint with the different textures. The result was some awesome artwork filled with different colors and textures! We talked about the different textures and materials as we worked. We hope to make this a regular activity in our classroom now.
We also spent one day exposing the kids to our creation station. This has been available to the kids throughout the whole school year, but we felt like it wasn't getting used much. We decided to pull everything out of our creation station and put it on our long table. We stayed near the table for guidance and encouraged the kids to come over and explore some of the loose parts in our room. They made all types of amazing creations with things such as egg cartons, paper towel holders, bulletin board borders, tissue paper, basically all the random things we've been able to find around school and at home. We're guessing they hadn't used these items because we hadn't officially offered them to play in this area. Once we introduced it, it's been non stop play...which we love! If you have any random items at home that you could donate to our creation station, the kids would love it! We take just about everything!
It was such a fun week of learning and playing! I hope you've enjoyed all the sukkahs and artwork that have been coming home this week :)
Love,
Ms. Rachael
Approaches to Learning:
- Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
- Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questions and adding ideas.
- Show increasing ability to maintain interest in self-selected activities and play despite distractions and interruptions.
- Understand that a task can be accomplished through several steps.
Social & Emotional:
- Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers activities and materials.
- Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.
- Develop strategies to express strong emotion with adult help.
Language & Literacy:
- Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
- Ask "how" and "why" questions about things in books and their environment.
- Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
- Contribute to small group or whole class dictation activities.
- Understand relationship between print and pictures on page.
Mathematics:
- Organize and represent data with real objects.
- Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
- Represent simple joining and separating situations through 4.
- Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
Creation Station creativity at work...
Making our pumpkin slim!...
Hardworking sukkah builders...
