Hello everyone

We are well into our Chanukah curriculum.  When we talk to the children about Chanukah we are focusing on Chanukah as a time of celebration.  On this holiday we eat yummy foods, like donuts and potatoe latkes.  We listen and dance to festive music, and play dreidel.  To experience one of the fun practices of the holiday, we made donuts.  The children got to make them from scratch, decorate them, and then bring some home to share with their family.  

Another important message we have been focusing on during the holiday is the idea of mitzvot, when we do somthing nice for somebody else that is a mitvot.  Everytime a child shares his toys, helps morah we recognize his good deed and tell him what a nice mitzvot he has just done.  We also learned that when we make challah and celebrate Shabbat on Friday, and light the Menorah that those are all Mitzvot.  Each holiday we have learned about this year has in some way brought the very important message of caring and sharing with one another, a value that is very important for our age group, and one we will keep repeating throughout the remainder of the school year.

For a fun Chanukah art project we made Menorahs.  The morahs cut out Menorahs and  put different colored paints out on them and gave each child a straw to blow through.  IT was really exciting for them see how the paint spread out thoroughout the picture from them blowing.  It was a fun new way to approach art.  We also did fingerpainting with the cutout Menorahs.  Both these art projects can be seen in and outside of our classroom.    

Skills focused on :

spacial recognition-   Menorah line up- we had pictures of  Menorahs, 9 lines of candles where each child took blocks and  lined them up on the lines and counted how many were needed to fit the area.
patterns- also with the Menorah line up for some of children we  worked on basic patterns, red yellow red yellow etc..
number recognition and counting-  we made frying pans.  On   each pan there was a number as well as dots matching the  number.  We took pretend latkes and counted out the number of latkes that corresponded with the number and dots.  Some  children could recognize the number and others counted the  dots.
vocabulary- Menorah, Chanukah, dreidel, latkes.
fine motor- spinning the dreidel.  

Happy Holidays 

Morah Jocelyn and Morah Chaya