Building together

The Keshet children found a very large basket of magna-tiles when they arrived this morning.  We saw various individuals and groups doing a lot of experimenting with them.    There were multi level buildings where each floor contained open space, solid towers, AND a superhero rescue from the top of a tower.  Last but not least, it seems that Ethan may have created a new wing for the Natick Collection!

Focus, determination, and teamwork were all evident as the children worked.  Physics lessons are learned in our experimentation as well.

Real Tools at work in play...

The Keshet kids had another opportunity to work with the real hammers today.  You can see that Abby and Allison are extremely focused as they sit across from one another, pounding the golf tee "nails" into the thick, heavy foam.  Abby grinned and giggled as she exclaimed "It went all the way in!" when her nail ended up flush with the foam.  So satisfying!  

This activity was offered throughout the day today and the children continued to be interested and engaged for long periods of time.  This is a great way to develop their eye hand coordination,  You can see the determination in the eyes of the girls in the photos below!

Determination

"Can I look under this rock?" asked Elias. After receving an encouraging response, Elias got to work. First he tried from one side, then he moved his body around and tried from the other side. When it didn't budge, he moved to a slightly smaller rock and tried again. "This is really hard!" he exclaimed. But Elias was determined to move the rock. He tried and tried and tried and finally...success!

Look at that!

In the Keshet classroom, there are moments when we can see focus and determination in our young students.  The children are able to choose an activity, work hard at it, and persevere in the face of challenges.  Whether they are constructing a special train track or slicing cheese to add to our tuna noodle casserole for Rosie's Place, they are involved and very capable.

Having fun with tissue paper and mod podge

The first thing the children noticed about the mod podge was its smell. Fortunately that didn't discourage our young artists from working hard to decorate the clay flower pots. It took some patience and fine motor coordination to apply the lightweight and flyaway pieces of tissue paper to the curved surfaces of the pots. Not to be discouraged the children persisted until they were happy with their creations. We will continue this colorful and sticky activity again tomorrow.

Success!

Today we saw daring, strength, and some great big smiles as Molly experimented at the monkey bars.  One of the Unicorn children was demonstrating her technique for grasping the first rung, swinging her legs up and into the air, and bringing her feet back down on the platform.  Molly watched a few times and agreed to try it with a teacher as her "spotter".  Molly tried a number of times with just the tiniest bit of support from her teacher until...voila: Molly did it herself.  What a delight it was for Molly to see what she could do!  She surprised her Unicorn friend who was quite impressed to see what a determined three year old can do.

Preparing to go to Israel!

The Tel Aviv class has been working hard to prepare for our big trip to Israel to celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's birthday! We are leaving tomorrow for our big trip and in order to prepare we have been working on designing, and decorating a plane, creating passports and making Israeli flags! Today we spent a lot of time looking at and creating passports. I brought in my own passport and we saw that it said United States of America on the front and inside it had lots of different information about me in it. It had my full name (which a lot of kids were surprised to learn!) my birthday, my birth place and a picture! We then worked hard to create our own passports with information we thought was important. They included each child's name and picture, some included birthday  and many children wanted to be measured to include their heights! It was neat to work with each child individually to help them create a passport that was meaningful to them. Each of them spent a lot of time writing both numbers and letters and their final products were quite impressive.  Furthermore, they were so proud of their product and the work that they had accomplished.  Tomorrow they will bring the passports with them on the plane and they will get a special stamp when we arrive in Israel! Shalom friends! See you when we return!!

Rainbow Shabbat on Thursday

The Rainbow class celebrates Shabbat on Thursdays as we are not at school on Fridays. The pretend Challah was a real hit in the kitchen area. Jack really worked hard on trying to cut the Challah, while Josh decided that after he cut the Challah he wanted to try to cut hot dogs, and Grayden decided to get creative with cutting the Challah and cook it with cauliflower mixed in. Thank you Sophie for being such a great Shabbat Helper today!

Determination

With determination, Isaac continued his shoveling project. He was intent on moving the snow from the playground. His attitude seemed to be that although it was huge job, someone's got to do it! After watching the adults around him shoveling for hours all winter, Isaac took his job seriously, focusing on the task, and continuing to shovel his patch of ground.