Dear Peach Room parents, it was a pleasure having parent - teacher conference with you!

     Gross motor activities

     Our friends love to explore the playground and outdoors on their own. They're so independent! But Morahs are always next to them, keeping an eye on them and making sure we're all safe. Our friends enjoy playing in the sandbox and feeling the rough texture of the sand, climbing on the climbing structure, riding bikes, sliding on the slide, and balancing on the beam. All these activities are great at developing our gross motor skills. These skills help our friends to run, catch a ball, climb etc. We are loving our outdoor play! 

Fine motor activities

     Inside our classroom we are working on our fine motor skills. Morahs put out soft rugs with manipulatives on them so our friends could visit a station of their choice to strengthen their fine motor skills. Hailey and Madison explored boxes fastened with all sorts of locks. They used their fine motor skills to open and close each box. Inside the box were a bunch of little toy pieces which our friends took out and put back inside. This took a lot of patience! 

     Angie used her hand eye coordination to put different sized penny's on a peg. Ella mixed colors in the peg holder. Yehonathan also used his fine motor skills to place corks inside and out of a pool noodle! All of the objects and activites are great for our friends.

     Dear parents and friends, thank you for another great week. Have a wonderful winter break! Shabbat Shalom - Morah Ora and Morah Goldie 

Dear parents, this week in the peach room we chose to explore the cold season - winter!! 

     At the beginning of the week we had ice in the sensory table. Our friends enjoyed scooping the ice into the buckets and listening out for the sounds it made. Angie said “It’s cold, my hands are cold” and some of our friends started repeating “It’s cold!” After some time of exploring the tools, we added salt to the ice. Each of our friends took turns adding salt. We discovered that the salt stuck to the ice! The salt also made the ice crack but it didn’t fall apart. 

     We made snow! 
     Another activity we did to explore the cold was making snow!  We made it by using baking soda and hair conditioner. We molded snowballs and crushed the snow between our fingers. We also pretended that we were playing in snow (pillow stuffings.) Our friends threw the snow in the air and watched it fall. Yehonathan and Ella had so much fun rolling around in the snow! Then we added some foam to the snow stuffing, and our friends liked the noise of crushing the little foam pieces under their feet.

     Morah Ora brought some scarves and mittens to our play area. Morah Ora said “It’s freezing in the Peach Room, let’s put on some scarves and gloves!” Our friends took turns to get their scarf and their mittens from the bucket. They even matched the mittens together! What a fun week of winter exploration!

     Can you make a snowflake?
     We used q-tips to create our own snowflake shapes. Madison was focusing while she was using the q-tip, she didn’t even get her hands dirty in paint! Ella, Hailey, and Yehonathan chose to use their hands to create hand print snowflakes.

     We would like to thank Hailey’s mom for giving the Peach Room a wonderful Hanukkah present!

     Dear parents, we can’t wait to see you at parent - teacher conference on Wednesday! 

     Good Shabbos! - Morah Ora and Morah Goldie

Dear Peach Room parents!
This has been a week full of music and celebration in our room. Our friends are singing and dancing to "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and "Oh Chanukah". We are marking each day of the festival of lights by having a different friend pretend to be the shamash candle and "light" our tape menorah by adding a piece of colored tape. We also finished our special Chanukah project and sent it home- so hopefully you all received the handmade menorahs your children created in class.

Our explorations continued this week with olives and olive oil. Our friends have been smashing olives to make oil as well as tasting them. Some our friends likes olives, some do not . A project that captured all of the children's attention and interest was creating olive oil lava lamps. They loved pouring water, oil and liquid water color into their bottles and watching what happens. They were enjoying it so much that we decided to have them add beads and pom poms to their lamps and then they explored how they looked on our light table when they were turned over, shaken and left alone for the oil to separate fully and rest at the top.

Our big project this week as we finished learning and celebrating about Chanukah, was making latkes. Our friends washed and peeled potatoes in our sensory table. They took turns helping to grate the potatoes and add the other ingredients. They also took turns mixing and scooping them onto a baking sheet. They were amazing little cooks, we were so impressed! Then we all enjoyed tasting our hard work.

Happy Chanukah and Shabbat Shalom
From Peach room Morahs.

Dear Parents

This week we began to introduce Chanukah through storybooks. The words and concepts we are working on with the children are Chanukah, Menorah and Dreidel. Angie and Madison said, "Menorah" and Yehonathan  said, "Chanukah" very clearly. We are noticing many exciting language developments in all of the children.

Morah Ora created a Menorah on our floor using tape. Our friends will be using this "walk the line" - a fun gross motor activity targeting body awareness, motor planning, balance, coordination and listening skills. We will also use our tape Menorah to mark each day of Chanukah by adding tape candles and flames.

We also explored candle wax through fine motor play with candles and our menorah. We used real candles and they have been practicing placing all eight candles in the menorah as well as the shamash candle. We counted the candles and sorted them by color and broken vs. non-broken. We saved all of our broken candles from this work and our friends created a group collage on canvas using candles and bits of wax and wick.

Another fun art and sensorial experience this week was a group art project using their feet and paint. There was a lot of laughter and excitement and careful dancing because it was so slippery! We have moved our latke cooking into our kitchen area and added a dreidel chair that spins for fun gross motor play. Ella, Yehonathan and Angie couldn't get enough of spinning like dreidels- they loved it! Madison was observing them thoughtfully and decided she wanted to give it a try. It was good experience in turn taking. Our friends love swinging and spinning and it is important to their vestibular development for their sense of balance. And it really is just fun!

We are excited to see everyone at Dreidels for Dads next  Friday morning from 9-10am. Happy Chanukah!

Shabbot shalom

Morah Ora and Morah Goldie.

Thanksgiving is coming!

Dear parents, with fall in the air and Thanksgiving around the corner, this week we use our senses to discover and investigate a pumpkin. Our friends took turns touching the outside of the pumpkin, they noticed that the texture was mostly soft with a few bumpy rough patches around the pumpkin. Then we felt the inside. The texture was completely different!

Spice Exploration
This was a class favorite! We used our sense of smell, sight, and touch to explore and create a scent collage with spices. Our friends had a chance to smell each of the spices. They then decided which ones they wanted to use to create their own scent collage.

Yehonathan preferred the cinnamon, Ella really like the cumin, Angie liked both the color and the scent of the paprika.They experimented using paint and stamp brushes to spread the glue before sprinkling the spice of their choice. We talked about how we use spices when we cook our favorite food at home.

Thanksgiving
Our friends have been practicing using kindness with our friends and Morahs. We talked about the mitzvos that our friends did at home and practiced using mitzvah hands, mitzvah feet, and our mitzvah mouth at school.

Dear parents, we hope to see you at the Thanksgiving lunch on Wednesday at 11:30!

Shabbat Shalom - Morah Ora and Morah Goldie

Dear parents, 

This week our friends did different activities with transportation. Every morning of this week our friends matched the transportation puzzles, specifically Yehonathan enjoyed these puzzles a lot!

Then our friends took their cars to the car wash in our sensory table where there was soapy water and sponges.  Angie and Madison were scrubbing their cars to make sure they were super clean. When our friends were done cleaning their cars they took pretend people for a ride around the classroom.

Another great activity our friends did was painting with cars. They stretched, walked, crossed the middle line, and drove their cars right through the paint during this gross motor activity. We also made our own traffic lights and Morah explained to our friends the safe way to cross the streets.

We would like to thank our kindergarten friends and their Morah for making such a delicious soup to wish us a happy Rosh-Chodesh.

Shabbat shalom! -Morah Ora and Morah Goldie

Dear parents, 

This week in the peach room our friends had so many fun activities with animals. We had farm animals in the sensory table with sand and different size scoopers to find and name them all.

The next day we washed and scrubbed animals with sponges and toothbrushes which our friends enjoyed! With the beautiful weather outside Morah likes to set some activities outside for our other classroom friends to join in and play together with us.

We brought wild animals with white paint and black paper, each friend picked an animal they liked and dipped it in the white paint and then stamped it on the black paper to see the different foot shapes each animal has. We spoke about how animals and people have different shaped feet, some are longer than others, some are wider than others.

This week we learned about Parshas Noah. Morah Ora made a make-shift ark out of a big cardboard box with cut out windows. We took turns peaking through the windows and said hello to our friends and Morah’s. Then Morah added a bridge to our ark. Our friends took turns going inside the ark and balancing their bodies on the bridge. These activities help our friends build some motor skills!

On Friday our friends went outside to play with the animals in the petting zoo! We were so excited to be able to pet our beautiful animals and hear all the different types of sounds they make, and feel how different each animal feels.

The peach room would like to thank Yehonathan for donating the new animals and magnatiles for our friends to play with! Thank you so much!!

Good Shabbos!
Morah Ora and Morah Goldie