Monthly Archives: September 29, 2016

Each day the yeladim are given the opportunity to have free play. This is a great time for the children to explore different classroom areas and to bond with each other using different tools. They feed off each other in what they are doing and sometimes in their conversations.  We love to eavesdrop on their conversations!!! Here are some of the things they shared this week.

Noam who likes playing in sand says, “I am making a sand castle.”

Anna who is creating with the magnets says, “I am making a castle.”

Anna arrives at sand with Noam and says” I am the big sister and I am going to get bigger just like my mom and dad”.

Eli was on the floor with the blocks and said, “We are building a real castle.”

Mae loves baking in the kitchen. “I am making apple pie.”

Effie was playing with the pattern beads. “I am making lollipops!”

Tal was exploring the magnets. “I am making a speedboat.”

Rosh Hashanah is still in the air, as we were creating cards the yeladim painted bubble wrap yellow for a bee hive. They loved the bubble wrap so much that we left some in the housekeeping are and the yeladim were popping the bubbles!

We love to search through our closets and find interesting things and figure out how to use them. We found some foam bees that were all different colors. The yeladim had a blast as they sorted the bees by color to match the corresponding colors of the circles on our mat! So much fun!

We have become bakers the past two days! Wednesday morning we made challah dough. We mixed, measured, and counted the ingredients. Thursday morning we shaped them! Since we had focused so […]

This week we welcomed a new boy into our class! His name is Ayalon. We showed him all around our classroom and have been getting to know him and showing him all the fun things we do every day.

The shofar factory visited us yesterday. We paid such close attention as Rabbi Rosenblum showed us where a shofar comes from – he had a big ram head with 2 horns on top!

Lia said, “It’s like a sheep!”

Lieba said, “The ram doesn’t have earrings.”

He passed around lots of different kinds of shofars – big ones and little ones – and we touched them to see if they were smooth or bumpy.

We loved when he blew a very, very long shofar sound – a tekiyah gedolah! We practiced making shofar sounds along with him and remembered what they were. Then Lauren and Ayalon helped him measure the shofar to see how long to make it.

We all had a chance to use sandpaper to make it shiny to use on Rosh Hashana.

Thank you Rabbi Rosenblum!

It’s been a busy week with the Sunflowers!

Our clay apple sculptures dried so we were able to paint them “apple red” or “apple green”. They look great!

As we continued our focus on bees, we looked at large pictures of real bees. We observed the parts of a bee and noted the abdomen and wings and yellow and black stripes. With this information the children were then able to create their own version of a bee by painting the base of the body yellow and then adding black stripes as well. The yeladim are excited to place their very own bees on the container for their honey pot.

Not only did we create pretend bees, we actually pretended to be bees as well. We listened to the music composed by Rimsky-Korsakov, “Flight of the Bumble Bee”, and since we learned that bees communicate by wiggling and dancing, we wiggled and danced to the song! The song is very fast, just how bees fly from flower to flower and slurp up the pollen and nectar. We had a great time!

We love cutting, so we recycled pretty Rosh Hashanah cards and cut them into different shapes. Then the yeladim glued the shapes on to a big piece of brown butcher paper. We added ‘LeShana Tova’ in Hebrew on the top and it looks great. We are going to hang it upstairs in the lobby!

Last but not least, since we stamped with pomegranates on paper, we decided we weren’t finished enjoying this special fruit! We actually made pomegranate play dough! First, we smelled our real pomegranate fruit. Next, we explained to the yeladim that some people make teas out of delicious fruit. We showed them pomegranate […]

The following is a true story!! Every bit of it!

Rabbi Mischel loves to spend time in our classrooms! As a matter of fact, if you are supposed to meet with him and can’t find him, come visit us!! That is exactly where he was found this week! And he brought with him a very special Shofar. Rabbi Mischel tells us that every year on Rosh Hashana it is his job to say out loud the names of each shofar note so the blower knows what to blow. He told us he says Tekiah and waits to hear one long note, Shevarim, he waits to hear 3 shorter notes, Teruah he listens for many quick notes, and his favorite Tekiah Gedolah, one really really really long note! Well we wanted him to blow his shofar for us. But Rabbi Mischel said, with a very sad expression on his face, that he has never really been able to get any sounds out of his shofar. Well, we told Rabbi Mischel that it is important to keep trying and not to get discouraged. We cheered him on and said, “You can do it!” So Rabbi Mischel put the shofar up to his mouth and we all shouted, “Tekiah!” and guess what!! Rabbi Mischel was able to blow the Tekiah!! He looked so happy. So we shouted, “Shevarim!!” And again he was able to do it!! Rabbi M was getting excited now. We shouted , “Teruah!!!” Well, What do you think we heard!! And Rabbi Mischel said to us, “Yeladim, I can’t believe it!! Do you think we should try for the Tekiah Gedolah? I don’t think I can do it! After all those, it might be too […]

We’ve been continuing our honey explorations for the last few days. We touched a piece of a real beehive! No there were no bees nearby. Morah had brought an old one into school. We made sure to touch it gently with one finger so it wouldn’t break. It felt bumpy and our fingers fit perfectly in the little holes!

We noticed the texture of the hive. We made beehive prints by painting bubble wrap and then stamping them onto paper. The bumps from the bubble wrap made the paint on the paper look just like the holes we saw in the hive. Lieba said, “Look at my beehive!”

At snack time, everyone got a spoonful of honey to taste as we sang Dip the Apple in the Honey.

Lia said, “I don’t like it.”

Zachary ate the whole thing.

Lauren said, “Can I have more please?”

Emily smiled when she tasted it and asked for more.

Lieba said, “I want to smell it! It smells like honey!”

We also explored apples. We held a red apple, a green apple, and a yellow apple. We noticed though they were all round, they each looked different from the other. Then we cut them up for a yummy snack, tasted each of them and said which one we like best. Uriel, Lieba, Emily, and Lia said they like green apples, Lauren said she likes red apples, and Maayan, Simon, and Zachary chose yellow. Lauren said, “It smells like food!”

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We created a beehive to hang from the tree in our classroom. We looked at pictures of real beehives and noticed their shape and color. We looked again at our real beehive in the classroom and remembered the color and the holes. On the large brown butcher paper we […]