Collaboration at its best!

During lunch bunch, a few of the Adamah children decided to make a puppet show.  The three children worked together to determine who would have which puppet, and stood behind the puppet theater to put on the show! 

Where can we put our pennies?

During the first week of camp, we started our penny drive. Many children brought in pennies from home, but we didn't know what to do with them!

Together, we read the story, How Dalia Put A Big Yellow Comforter Inside a Tiny Box, by Linda Heller. In the story, Dalia tells her little brother that she is putting a big yellow comforter, a butterfly bush, and a banana cream pie into a tiny box. She teaches her brother all about tzedakah.


After reading the book, the children discussed how we could make our own tzedakah box. They said we would need wood, tools, and things to decorate it with.


The next morning, we used mosaic tiles and glue to decorate our very own tzedakah box. It took team work, but we were able to cover all of the sides and the top with beautiful glass tiles.


Once the tzedakah box dried, we began filling it with the many pennies the children had brought in. That morning we counted 43 pennies that we put into the tzedakah box. Since then the children have added many more pennies! The penny drive will continue all summer. You may want to collect some pennies with your child to bring in to put into our tzedakah box!

Chanukah Puppet Show

We have turned our Dramatic Play area into a Chanukah Party, and today Audrey, Jack, Sophie, and Reed had a Chanukah puppet show.  They pretended to light their menorahs and made up a song whose highlights included  "We love the light.  The light is so beautiful.  We love the light." repeated over and over!

  

Engineers at Work

For the last couple of days some of the Unicorn boys have been collaborating on designing road maps for their cars.  They started with telling the teacher where they wanted the roads, and what kind of designs they wanted to incorporate into the streets.  Hearts were very popular.  Today the maps became more elaborate.  Some children added letters or numbers to their maps.  In one of the shots below you can see Max explaining why he thinks more numbers were needed in one section of the map.   There has been some wonderful teamwork and lots of ideas expressed as everyone shares their vision of how the maps should evolve. 

The Shushan Castle!

Our palace/castle has come a long way! Check it out!

Shadows, Lights, Colors

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We Cooked a Tree!

Today in Lunch Bunch Max, Jared, Molly and Alana cooked a sugar cookie tree! We made sugar cookie dough and used food coloring to make it green and brown. It was great to add in the food coloring and kneed the dough and watch it tune different colors. We then made the tree on the cookie sheet remembering to make roots, a trunk, branches and leaves! When it was all done we sang happy birthday n english and hebrew to celebrate Tu B'shevat! It was quite a yummy afternoon!

3, 2, 1 Blastoff!!

Yesterday Dancing Nancy had us all put on our helmets, turn our bodies into spaceships and head off for space! This made quite an impression as today many of our friends spent a long period of time building a spaceship out of magnablocks. We have recently added some larger, hollow, wooden blocks to our classroom. After some trial and error, the group figured out how to use the wooden blocks as a base for the less sturdy magna blocks. What collaboration and creativity!

Bringing the big blocks back to our classroom have been a big hit. We can credit Sherry Grossman, a Gateways Educational Consutant, who has been working with our team this week, for this. Sherry has been helping us to look at our classroom and materials in new and interesting ways, and the Unicorns have been very responsive!

Rainbow Artists

Whether painting with others or painting alone, the easel is a popular area for the Rainbow kids. Some children prefer to paint on their own while others do not mind if another child comes to join them. When several children are painting the same picture, lots of cross-talk can be heard about what they are painting, what colors they are using, and where the paint should go on the paper. Important skills are being developed such as turn taking, cooperation, and sharing. When the children are asked what they are painting, some interesting responses are usually heard. When I asked Audrey what she was painting, she said, "I'm painting a cat; not an angry cat but a friendly cat, and it's not scary." Such dialogue promotes language development and back and forth exchange between the teacher and child. The dialogue also promotes development of children's imaginations.

Fun With Glue!

The Tel Aviv class experimented with tissue paper and glue today. They enjoyed squeezing the bottles and creating fun designes with the glue on their paper and then adding the tissue paper on top of it. Rachel created a heart out of glue. Hannah made a beautiful flower with different color petals. Lily and Eliza worked together to create a masterful piece of art. The Tel Aviv class loves working with other media and the colors are fantastic. Later this week we will practice glueing for a structured project but today was a day of unstructured fun with glue!

Together We Can Build Skyscrapers!

One of the guiding principles we continually reflect on in our classroom is "We Help Each Other." As we work with children to help them understand what it means to help each other we begin to see more examples of this in our daily interactions. We then discuss all we can and will accomplish as a class when we work as a team. Micah started building a skyscraper and, with Nathan's enthusiastic help, was able to make it taller than the teachers! This teamwork then spread to include Drew and Max. We talked about all we can do when we help each other - even build skyscrapers! .

Can the Dollhouse be a Barn?

Abby and Jared working together to paint sunsets to hang in the windows of our barn.

What an excited group of children coming through the Unicorn door this morning! Everyone was so happy to see their friends and share their stories of trips to Disney on Ice, playing at home with siblings, or airplane rides to warmer places. While we shared stories we also worked on a collaborative project of turning our dollhouse into a barn for our animals. Everyone had ideas on how to transform the dollhouse. Jacob wanted to hang his sunset painting in the window, and Max wanted to use tissue paper as grass. We love working on projects together as we share, exchange and explore our thoughts and ideas.

Levana Friends

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Tel Aviv creates a Fall Collage

This past Friday we went on a leaf hunt around the playground and came inside for a fall collage. We had a cardboard box left over from earlier in the week that we decided to decorate. So many members of the Tel Aviv class came over to decorate the box. Instead of paintbrushes we used leaves and sticks to apply paint to the box. Using a stick to apply paint was a completely different experience. The stick made it harder to make think lines and children would try to apply paint very heavily with the stick which sometimes worked and other times resulted in a lot of paint dripping. Once the paint was all over the table everyone decided that it was time for finger-painting! It was a good project to try different techniques to see what worked best. The box turned out beautiful and we plan on gluing a layer of leaves sometime this week!

Levana's Sukkah

Last week Tina's husband, Peter, was kind enough to come visit the Levana classroom to build us a sukkah! We have been having a wonderful time talking and thinking about how we want to decorate our sukkah. We have been collecting items from nature - stalks of greens and pinecones. Today Eliana added a leaf she found in the yard! If you have an item you'd like to add to help us decorate, please bring it in!

We love spending time in our sukkah as much as we loved decorating it. We have all enjoyed reading books about Sukkot, singing, dancing, and playing. It is a very popular spot in our classroom. Be sure to drop by for a visit! Thank you Peter!

An Invitation

The Kohavim children entered the classroom to find this invitation. The table was set with blue paper, pencils, a pencil sketch and the instructions: Make a blueprint of what you see or make your own design. Four places were set and ready and a stack of extra blue paper was close at hand for the children to use.

Next to the drafting table was the beginnings of a block and cardboard tube structure that the teachers had built as inspiration. Notice that they used cardboard columns as the base, rather than the typcial large rectangle blocks the children usually select first, already bringing the activity to a higher level. And next to that, a display of books about building, architecture and balance, some fiction and some non fiction, for the children to consult as reference in both their building and blueprint work.

What an invitation to think, create, and collaborate.

Mesmerizing Magnet Tiles

At some point through the day every child in the Tel-Avv class was playing with magnet tiles. There were houses, castles, spaceships and even a fire station made today in our block area. Magnet tiles are a great toy for this group because it allows for independent, parallel and cooperative imaginative play. It was great to see different groups of children playing with each other and to see the social fluidly among groups of children in the Tel Aviv class. One of the highlights included the repetitive building and knocking down a magnet tile tower. It was great to see Jacob, Dylan, Ezra and Eli all taking turns knocking the tower down. Eliza put two triangles together and made a diamond. She said that it was a bird flapping her wings. It was great to watch the children experiment with shapes and building while using their imaginations. I can’t wait to see what they will imagine tomorrow!

Lunch Bunch Votes on Science or Art?

Today in Lunch Bunch I reminded the children back in the Fall we made a list of thing they would like to do in Lunch Bunch. The question of the day was...Do you want focus in on interesting, fun science experiments or art activities? So we took a vote! Science got 7 votes and art got 4 votes. We decided that as we focus in on science activities/experiments, we would also incorporate art and cooking! It doesn't get better then that! Oh yes, let's not forget that one of their favorite things to do at Lunch Bunch is to play games and get some exercise in Simon Hall(Mr Parachute,Mr Fox, Uncle Sam and free play with balloons and balls)! I reassured the children that we will have opportunities to play in Simon Hall too!

After we voted, we play cooperatively with magnitiles on the rug(at "peace out time") and then went into Simon Hall to play some games with our Sunshine friends!

Learning Through Collaborative Inquiry

To ask, to argue, to interpret, and to transmit are not only deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, but also essential elements of our growth and maturity. As Matthew, Jeffrey, and Daniel explored a book about space they took turns being the student and the teacher, asking some questions and answering others. Constantly alternating roles, questioning and listening, and using the conversation to give birth to new questions and challenges in this small group, each of them furthered their own learning by collaborating together. It is this style of learning that is critical to young children, helping them develop inquiry and collaboration tools they will use on their lifelong learning journey.

Gak, Musical Chairs, Games etc...

Lunch Bunch flew by! The children created houses, jewelry and other interesting structures with magnets. We made fresh green gak, Sam P brought in a board game from home to share with his friends, and a game of musical chairs really hit the spot! The day ended with a delicious cup of hot (warm) hot chocolate!