We have had such a fun week celebrating Purim! We spent the week learning the story of brave Esther who saved the Jewish people from Haman. We've spent time reading books about this story and discussing the importance of this holiday. We've also added different elements of the holiday into our center and group times. Our learning this week ran parallel with our work with Morah Devorah, so it made a week full of learning and celebrating this holiday!
We wanted to spend some time this week focusing on the four mitzvah of Purim. The first of these is Mishloach Manot. This is the giving of food to others. To demonstrate this, we weaved our own baskets using yarn and paper bowls. After weaving them, we filled them with clementine and homemade hamantaschen that the kids made. After putting food in their baskets, they gave them to a friend in the classroom. As we made these exchanges, we talked about the importance of giving to others and being thankful for what we were given. We also gave extra Tzedakah this week as well as listened to Morah Devorah read part of the Megillah (both mitzvah). The kids made groggers (noise makers) that they shook when the name of Haman was read aloud. We really enjoyed this as the Megillah was read in Hebrew - what an awesome experience! Another mitzvah for Purim is having a festive meal together. While we didn't have an actual meal (other than our family style lunches), we did discuss this mitzvah during our lunches and enjoyed sampling our hamantaschen!
To make our groggers, we let the kids decorate water bottles with glue and pieces of tissue paper. After decorating them, we filled them with beans so they would make a loud noise when we shook them. These were great to use as we read Purim stories this week and worked to drowned out the name "Haman".
We also spent time this week making our own hamantaschen. The kids loved it! They cut out circles in our dough and filled the dough with their choice of fillings. We had apricot jam, strawberry jam, grape jam, and chocolate chips. Once they filled their dough, they worked to shape them into a triangles. Each of us made 2 pieces. On Friday, after we weaved our baskets, we had the kids pick one of their hamantaschen (along with the clementine) to give away to a friend. This was a great time for us to talk about giving to others and allowed us to put a focus on the feelings of others. It was a sweet time of giving and caring for one another.
The bulk of our week was spent making our awesome carnival games! Each preschool class worked to make a couple of games for other children around the school to come and play with during our celebration on Monday. We sat down together and brainstormed several different types of games that we could make. After gathering a handful, we took a vote. The kids chose to make a fishing game and a ring toss game. This was a great time for us to incorporate science and math as we took measurements, discussed magnetics (used for our fishing game) and how they work, and think about objects to use for ring toss. We knew we wanted to use materials that would fly easily through the air. They chose to cut rings out of paper plates. After we finished making each game, we let the kids test it. That's what scientist do, after all! Through our testing, we found areas that we needed to improve on. This got us talking and thinking about changes we could make. Our biggest change was adding more paper clips to our fish so the magnetics would stick better. Every part of these games were made by the kids. The made the fish, added paper clips, went outside to hunt for sticks, attached magnets to our poles, decorated our rings and poles, everything! We are so proud of their hard work! We'll leave the games out next week so the kids can enjoy them during centers. Make sure you check them out!
Of course, on Monday we will spend the day dressed up! We will also play carnival games around school and even get to play with a giant blow up obstacle course that the school has rented for the day. They are so excited about it! We've even been doing a countdown to the big day!
We're looking forward to a great week ahead!
Love,
Ms. Rachael
Approaches to Learning:
- Reason about events, relationships, or problems.
- Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
- Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
- Try to solve problems encountered in play.
- Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.
- Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
- Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.
- Recognize own feelings and describe them some of the time.
- Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
- Distinguish between descriptions of story events and spoken words of characters.
- Retell one or tow events from a story read aloud.
- Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
- Recall some details in stories read aloud.
- Incorporate favorite parts of literary texts into play activities.
- Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
- Investigate solutions to simple problems.
- Locate patterns in the environment.
- Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
- Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
- Represent simple two-dimensional geometric shapes.
- Associate time concepts with a clock.
Working hard to make our games for the carnival on Monday!
Testing our games to make sure they work properly...
Making our Purim groggers!
Preparing our hamantaschen for us and a friend...
Carefully preparing our baskets to give to a friend. We made our baskets and then filled them with a note, homemade hamantaschen, and a clementine...
Enjoying the fun of Purim at school! Including dress up play, making music, and building some awesome castles...
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