Kohavim becomes Researchers

With Israel's Birthday approaching, the kohavim children read the book, It's Israel's Birthday. The book tells the story of how a class of preschoolers take a pretend plane ride to Israel to visit different places such as a kibbutz, a shuk, the Kotel, and the dead sea. Immediately following morning meeting, Lily and Molly flipped through non-fiction books to find out more information about Israel. They were so excited to share with children eating snack nearby the photographs they found of people floating in the Dead Sea. Together, they started brainstorming how we could turn parts of our classroom into Israel. Stay tuned to find out if take our own imaginary plane ride to Israel just like the children in the book, It's Israel's Birthday!

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.

Inquiring Minds Want To Know...

Jonathan's daily journal story was about missiles. He dictated his story to Alison, but she wasn't sure how to spell the word "missiles." Alison made a good guess, and after his story was finished, a number of us took out our Macmillan Dictionary For Children and we looked up the spelling of "missile." Alison had guessed correctly, but the dictionary gave us so much more interesting information. The definition of "missile" is "anything that is shot or thrown through the air," and the children had a great time brainstorming many other things that could be missiles.
The children then wanted to look up other words - "spaceship" was the next word that the kids wanted to look up. And then, Lucas was even interested in the extra bits of information in the dictionary, like the pronunciation guide.
Even teachers don't know everything, but we all had fun using our classroom resources.

Alison