Dear Room C Parents,
Can you believe it? We have already approached our last days of school and this will be our last newsletter of the year! It has been such an amazing time full of love, laughter, and growth. Your children have come such a long way from our first days here at school. You should be so proud of them, we certainly are! We want to thank you for entrusting us to teach and guide your children in their development. It has been our pleasure to be their first teachers. As we are winding down during our last days of class, we went on with business as usual. We continued to talk about our five senses and what we do with each. All of the children are identifying each sense and how we use them to experience the world around us. Our favorite messy, sensory experience was Blue “Ocean” Jello. We used our hands to touch and find all of the deep sea creatures hiding in the cold, slimy water. Some of us only touched briefly and other were totally engaged. We listened to our new favorite book again, “Mortimer” in which we continued to explore the difference between loud and quiet. The children sang along loudly, then quietly. Some of the children enjoyed the loud while others covered their ears. We talked about how that made our ears feel. We played peek-a-boo using our eyes, by covering and uncovering them...”what do you see when you cover your eyes?” “Nothing!” some of the children answered. Each activity carries more meaning as we experience it together with a new awareness. We ended the week with Shabbat, and we wanted to make it a very special one. As our last Shabbat together as a class we were sure to include all our favorite songs (“Bim Bam”, “Shabbat Soup” and “Nine little Hallah in the Bakery Shop”) and share a special treat of fresh fruit with our Hallah. We will miss our fun times spent in the Temple together! Thank you all, Room C families! Shabbat Shalom, Love Anita and Elena
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Dear Room C Parents,
This week we focused on our five senses. We talked about how we hear, see, smell, taste and touch to learn about the world around us. We made a lovely smelling rosemary play dough with fresh sprigs of rosemary. We tasted sweet fruit, salty cheese, sour lemon. We highlighted the difference between loud noises and quiet sounds. How do our ears feel? We looked at bright colors and talked about how they look, which is our favorite? As a tasting activity, we made pizza bagels. We talked about what we see, how they taste and we also tasted sweet strawberries, sour lemon and salty pretzels. We then talked about which tasted best, and which taste we didn’t like. Sensory /tactile activities included slime, cloud dough, play dough and paint and shaving cream squishy bags. All the while we talked about how things look, feel, smell, taste and sound bringing an awareness to how we make sense of everything around us. The children enjoyed identifying their body parts in connection with how they process sensory information. The story of “Mortimer” is all about loud sounds versus quiet. How do they sounds feel to our ears? Music with Andrew was also a blast this week. Playing with the egg shakers, the parachute and colorful scarves all while moving to the music was a big sensory party! Our week ended with a very nice time in the Temple for Shabbat. The children had a great time singing and listening to Ditza and Rabbi Josh singing and telling the story. What a busy fun filled week it has been! Shabbat Shalom & Have a Wonderful Holiday Weekend, Anita & Elena **Reminders** No school on Monday May 28 in observance of Memorial Day. Dear Room C Parents,
What a busy week it has been! We spent so much time working on fine motor activities, such as animal matching, stacking blocks to create tall towers and large structures on the rug, simple self correcting puzzles at the tables and our favorite, magna tiles on the light table. We can see that the skill level in this department really has increased. We have observed more sophisticated creations and longer periods of engagement. At circle time we also see that our children need more. We are shifting our focus to include more interactive experiences (each child gets a turn to contribute something to the story) and movement in our circle time and other classroom activities. The children are especially enjoying “We Are The Dinosaurs”, an interactive song where we all stomp around the room, then eat our food, then rest together as a group of dinosaurs. Another circle time time song the children have been enjoying is “Looking For Shapes” in which the children move their feet in a marching motion while sitting in their chairs, stopping when we “find” a shape. The children then take turns to identify and put that shape in our bag. By the end of the week, we were all ready to enjoy Shabbat with our Moms and Grandmas as our guests of honor. What a special time it was. The children so enjoyed your presence! We thank you all for joining us and sharing in the fun. Shabbat Shalom & Have a Wonderful Weekend! Anita & Elena Dear Room C Parents,
This week has been all about caterpillars and butterflies. Last Wednesday, our class caterpillars were delivered, and they have been busy eating and growing all week long and will soon be forming cocoons. We spent the week learning about the life cycle of butterflies with the story “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. We are highlighting counting, sequencing and how things change and grow. The children are so excited. On Wednesday, the children practiced their fine motor skills as they used droppers to paint colorful “tie dyed” wings using liquid watercolors on our beautiful butterflies. Take a look at our work! Music this week was also a blast! The children enjoyed playing parachute games and they are becoming experts at following along with the simple sequence of directions given by Teacher Andrew. For example, “Hold the parachute with two hands then shake, shake shake and stop.” So much fun! As we continue to increase our skills, our attention span, our ability to complete simple tasks and cooperate with friends, learning about sequencing plays a big role. Create a simple game or chore at home to practice completing two or three step directions with your little ones at home. They love playing with you, having responsibilities and helping out. We ended our week with a wonderful time spent together celebrating Shabbat. Singing and enjoying story time in the temple with Ditza and Rabbi Josh is alway very special. Our room C friends always have a great time. Shabbat Shalom & Enjoy your weekend, Elena & Anita **Reminders** Tot Shabbat is tomorrow, 5/5. Join us at 10:30 A.M. in Wise Woods. Next week, we are celebrating Mother's and Grandmother's week and we are inviting you all to take part in the brunch and all school Shabbat Services which will follow. Brunch is at 10am, followed by 11am services in the sanctuary. Hope to see you all there! Dear Room C Families,
We have had another busy, fun filled week of learning here in room C! our focus this week was identifying shapes. We learned a new shapes song, played shapes bingo (shape & color matching game) painted with sponge brushes, stamping circles and stars onto paper and created shapes with moon dough. The children can identify shapes receptively and expressively now. We invite you to continue the learning at home! Ask them about the shapes they see while you're driving, at home at the park, etc. It’s been amazing to see your children grow cognitively and socially, making connections, building language and their friendships each day. They have also shown such growth walking in line on the rope to the temple for Shabbat and sitting though services. Rabbi Sari and Ditza kept things lively and fun with music and story time so everyone had a great time! Shabbat Shalom & Enjoy the weekend Love, Anita and Elena Dear Room C Parents,
Room C has been buzzing with activities and excitement as we celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut this week! It was all about celebrating Israel. We shared the book, “Good Night Israel”, talked about the flag and its colors (as well as all other colors) in a lovely circle time story and sang happy birthday all week long. The holiday festivities provided lots of opportunities for learning as we continued to focus on exploring shapes and colors. For example how the the Star of David is made up of two triangles and the two stripes are rectangles (as well as the flag itself). We also continued to talk about feelings. The children really enjoyed our circle time song “The Story of my Feelings” again and we can see just how soothing and regulating music and movement can be. Look it up on YouTube- your little ones love it! On Yom Ha'atzmaut, we baked cupcakes. Each child got the chance to help pour and stir the ingredients while counting and practicing our turn taking skills. At the end of the day we lit candles, sang, "Happy Birthday" and enjoyed a our yummy treat in honor of Israel. I think it goes without saying, they really enjoyed this activity! We ended the week with special Shabbat services with Ditza and Rabbi Josh. We paraded around the temple proudly wearing the Israeli flag colors, shaking our blue and white Pompoms! So much fun!! Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend! Elena & Anita
Hi Room C Parents,
We have had a busy, rainy week of exciting indoor activities. We painted with frogs, enjoyed Passover story time and played with our new water filled light table blocks. Our most favorite was playing with the parachute while staying dry inside. Your children were all hard at work making their beautiful Passover place mats and matzah covers. They used frogs to stamp the paint on their mats and decorated the matzah covers with fabric markers. We loved having all of you in our classroom to share in our Passover story and Seder. We hope you enjoyed it too. After hearing the story and learning all the Passover songs over the last couple of weeks we hope they sing them for you at your upcoming seders. We ended the week by making chocolate chip Hallah and a wonderful time at the sanctuary for our special Passover services on Shabbat. The children loved singing along with Ditza! We hope you all have a fun and restful spring break and we will see you all back at school on April 9th. Shabbat Shalom, Anita and Elena ick here to edit. Dear Room C Parents,
Here in Room C, it’s been all about Passover this week. As we explore the themes of this very important holiday, we made sure to have lots fun along the way. With the help of felt stories, and songs we told the story of Passover and how the Jewish people had to work so hard for King Pharaoh, who was not a very kind man. He learned an important lesson though, when frogs were sent to jump all over him in his bed! We did lots of singing, dressed up as frogs, made matzah pizza and created matzah art with paper, brown paint and forks to make dots. The children have had lots of opportunities to participate in fine motor, art, sensory and early literacy activities that all tie in to Passover and have had tons of fun in the process. We ended our week on a sweet note with Shabbat in the chapel- the children did an awesome job and really enjoyed the services listening, singing and clapping along. All in all, it’s been a busy and productive week and we’re looking forward to more Passover projects next week. We also wanted to thank each of you, for coming in to sit down with us last week. We truly enjoyed the conferences and hope that you ditd too. In the hurried moments of pick up and drop off we don’t always get to connect and share so it was very nice to have the space to do so. Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts that came up for you later, we can always follow up by phone, email or talk with you Next week is our final week before spring break and we will celebrate Passover with our Classroom Seder on Wednesday, March 21st at 10:45 am. We invite you all to join us for a what’s sure to be a memorable event. We will share the Haggadah, blessings and of course all of the traditional foods. We hope you all can make it! Shabbat Shalom and have a wonderful weekend! Anita & Elena **REMINDERS** Spring Break is March 26- April 7 with classes resuming on April 9th Please remember to sign up to bring something for our classroom Seder if you haven’t done so yet (sign up sheet is on top of cubbies) Dear Room C Families,
It was a very special week here in room C. With the excitement of Purim behind us we are now shifting our focus to Passover. We introduced all the characters in the story, telling a very simplified version of the story with the help of some of our favorite Passover songs: “Baby Moses in the Basket”, “The Frog Song” “Bang your Hammer” and “Dayanu”. The children are already clapping along and getting very engaged. We will continue the fun and learning next week with crafts; felt board stories and more singing. As you all know, parent teacher conferences are approaching! We are looking forward to sitting down with each of you next week to talk about your children and all of the progress they’ve made since their first days of school. In other, exciting news, we went to Shabbat services for the first time! The children did a fabulous job of walking to the temple and back and sitting quietly as they listened to Ditza and Rabbi Josh. They had a wonderful time and we are look forward to many more fun excursions each Friday. Shabbat Shalom and have a wonderful weekend, Elena & Anita **REMINDERS** Early dismissal Tuesday of next week (3/13) at noon and no classes the following Wednesday (3/14) due to parent teacher conferences |