Tzemach Class 2016: Blocks and Mazes

Hello family and friends!

What a fun week we've had in the Tzemach class! This week has taken us in a lot of different directions as we enjoyed a special visitor and have been learning about the Jewish holiday of Tu B'Shvat. However, we've still spent most of our time learning through our ongoing blocks exploration. We're curious to see if the kids will want to extend this into next week or move on to something new...we'll keep you posted!

One fun thing we did this week was get a visit from a dentist office. We got to meet with the kindergarten class and learn all about our teeth and how to take care of them. We were taught the importance of brushing twice a day and how plague mixed with sugar can lead to cavities. The dentist office was so impressed with how much we already knew about our teeth! We also got to practice brushing teeth on a large model of a mouth with a giant tooth brush. As we did this we focused on brushing the top, front, and backside of each tooth. We also got to take home a tooth brush and tooth paste when we left! The kids were very engaged and are still talking about it.

We have also finished our model skyscrapers!! This 3 week project has been an awesome one. The kids have spent so much time working and adding details to their buildings. This week we just focused on the final touches, such as windows and doors. Some of us chose to make these with foam and paper, while others chose to draw them on with markers. We will leave these out on display for a bit longer as the kids are very excited to show them off! They are very proud of their work, as they should be! Make sure you check them out when you have some extra time this week.

Even though we were done with our buildings, the kids were still wanting to continue our block exploration. We spent some time talking about different ways that we could use block besides constructing buildings. Throughout our talk, the idea of mazes came up. We discussed what they were, how they worked, and why a lot of thought had to be put into making one. We started by printing and laminating some mazes. I started with easy ones, not knowing how the kids would react to working them. I was told within 5 minutes that these mazes were entirely too easy! The kids helped me find some tricky ones on the computer and we printed and laminated them as well. This gave us a wide range of difficulty levels for the kids to explore. We kept the mazes out in centers for the kids to work through. We also worked in groups to make mazes with different types of materials. Throughout the week we've seen mazes made from wooden blocks, legos, snap cubes, and even our food during lunch time! These mazes were awesome! Some of the kids used our printed mazes to give them an idea of how to start. We discussed that we first needed a start and finish point. We also needed to make a clearly cut path but also provide walls. After each group felt like they completed their maze, we used either cars or marbles to work through the mazes. Most of the mazes took the groups several tries to get them just right. Once the cars went through the maze they usually found that they had too many walls without a direct path to the finish line. It was a great time of trial and error and thinking through their construction.

We've also spent time talking about Tu B'Shvat. This holiday is the "New Year of the Trees", when trees in Israel are beginning their fruit bearing cycle. This holiday relates our lives to tree in that, just as trees need strong roots to grow, we also need strong foundations. The fruit that we bare in our lives are our actions and how they affect those around us. This has led to discussions of how to treat others and how our good deeds can be a benefit to those around us. We also got to explore dates, figs, grapes, olives, and pomegranates. These are all fruits that grow in Israel. We explored these with Morah Devorah as she told us about each fruit and how it is grown. This has been a great time of exploration for us as we learn about a new holiday and it's importance!

We're looking forward to another great week!

Love,
Ms. Rachael

Approaches To Learning:

Show creativity and imagination using materials in representational play.
Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner4 by questions and adding ideas.
Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
Demonstrate an increasing ability to organize actions and materials in the learning environment.

Social & Emotional:

Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
Stand up for rights much of the time.
Use classroom materials responsibility, most of the time.
Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.

Language & Literacy:

Carry out simple directions and directives.
Complete a thought or idea when communicating with other.
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 stories, rhymes or poems.
Makes some upper case letters without regard to proportion or placement.

Mathematics:

Organize and represent data with real objects.
Use nonstandard units of measure to compare everyday objects.
Compare the lengths of two objects.
Represent simple two-dimensional geometric shapes.
Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
Show one-to-one correspondence through ten when counting real objects.
Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.

Enjoying our dentist visit...