Gratitude/Kindness

Hello! Dear Parents,

We would like to welcome Ariel, a new friend that joined our classroom. We are so happy to have her join the CJP family!

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. 

Gratitude Project

This week in class, we are using different techniques of painting for our gratitude rocks.

Gratitude Project/Rocks:

On Monday: Our friends used sponge paint brushes to paint their own rocks.

On Tuesday: Our friends were invited to choose different colors of paint and make some drops in the box. Then they shake, shake, and shake the box till we see beautiful results!

On Wednesday: We squeezed paint and glitter inside the ziplock bags and put some rocks in them. We rolled, pinched, and squeezed the bag to create unique designs on our rocks! Some friends observed that it was a little bumpy inside!

 

Table Top Activity

We had play dough and cranberries on the table. Our friends used their grasping motor skills by picking cranberries with their fingers and sticking them inside the play dough. Then we all had a turn counting how many cranberries we stuck in.We counted in English and Hebrew and our friends repeated after Morah.

Ariel had six cranberries .

Ari had two cranberries.

Mika four cranberries.

Avigail, Oz, and Daria had seven cranberries.

It was hard for our friends to not taste them but they did a good job when Morah explained to them that today we are only using cranberries for playing and counting! 

 

Next week will be short week. We will continue to focus on gratitude and kindness in our classroom and we will focus on these concepts throughout this school year.

 

Shabbat Shalom,
Morah Ora and Morah Chaya  

Thanksgiving/Fall

Dear parents!

With Fall in the air and Thanksgiving around the corner, this week we used our senses to discover and investigate a pumpkin. Our friends took turns touching the outside of the pumpkin. They noticed the texture was mostly soft with a few bumpy rough patches around the pumpkin. Then we cut the pumpkin open and felt the inside. The texture was completely different!

Spice Exploration
This was a class favorite! We used our senses 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.

Our sensory table was filled with spices this week. Cinnamon, Paprika, and Oregano aromas were present as the children used measuring spoons and cups to pour spices from spoon to cup. We saw that the Paprika and Cinnamon spices left a residue on our hands.  

Next week, we will be learning about gratitude and making meaningful projects to be sent home.

Shabbat Shalom, 

Morah Ora and Morah Chaya 

Transportation

Dear parents!

We would like to welcome Daria Gabay and Oz Atlas to the Peach Room. We are so happy to have them join the CJP family!

Every morning of this week, our friends did different activities with transportation. One activity was to match the transportation puzzles. Аri and Daria 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. Avigala and Mika 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.

Shabbot Shalom ,

Morah Ora and Morah Chaya

Noah's Ark and Animals

Dear parents,

This week we opened our Peach Room and we are so happy to have a new beginning.

Our friends were so excited to explore all of the centers in the classroom: the sensory bin, kitchen, library, slide and much more. Learning where all of the materials go, where each center is, and making sure everyone feels loved and safe are our main goals. After all the classroom exploration, we were ready to learn and explore about Noah's Ark and the animals. 

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 set some activities outside for our other classroom friends to join in and play together with us.
           
We created 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 Parsha 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 Morahs. Then Morah Ora 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!   

 

Thank you for trusting us to guide your little ones.

Shabbat Shalom!

Morah Ora and Morah Chaya

First Week of School!

 Dear parents,

We are so happy to be back to school!  We had such a wonderful week of getting to know each other and class room exploration.

Mika and Ari are having fun in the kitchen area and pretending to cook and have long conversations.
Abigail likes to spend time in the library, looking through books and naming each picture, and climbing on the loft.

Avigail showed her interest in fruit puzzles. 

Our friends are adjusting very well and already know our morning routine:
Before we come in to the class we need to take off our shoes.  We then find the shoe prints that we made with Morah Ora and put our shoes on the right shoe print cut out.  We then go inside the classroom and wash our hands right away. 

This week we spent our morning exploration and davening time with our Green Room friends.
The green room friends are teaching us so much, playing with us and helping our younger friends while being very gentle.  The Green room helpers have been helping us learn how to give out Tzedaka and recognize their Hebrew letters of their name.  

Because it is so hot out, we skipped water play this week and next, and can't wait for it a get a little cooler in the mornings.  We will share our daily schedule with you next week, as we are still adjusting to the best schedule for the children. 

Next week's unit is "All about me".
We will also continue spending more time exploring the classroom and materials and getting to know each other.

Please send a hard copy or email a picture of your child, a family picture, any pets that they have, a picture of their room or house, and a picture of their favorite toy.  We will be using these pictures to make a book with each child to read together in our classroom. 

We had Shabbos party today, making challah, having kiddush, singing Shabbos songs, and reading special Shabbos stories.  

Please, if you can each send in a plastic shoe box with a lid, that way we can have sensory exploration in a COVID-safe way.  

Also, while we do have water from the water fountain to refill your child's water bottle, if you would prefer they drink bottled water, please send an extra bottle to refill your child's water bottle. 

Thank you and looking forward for next week!

Shabbat Shalom,

Morah Ora and Morah Chaya. 

Purim day, Purim day, what a happy holiday!

Dear parents!

We began our exploration of Purim this week. We began by introducing the main characters of the Megillah: King Achashverosh, Queen Vashti, Haman, Queen Esther and Mordechai through finger puppets, dancing and storybooks.

ProjectThis week we painted canvases to create our own Shushan (castle)
Chumi chose green and yellow paint and she decided to mix them together.  Zelda choose green paint.  Abigail choose red paint. They enjoyed painting while morah Ora read them a purim story.

Our friends decorated masks with feathers and glitter so that we could dress up as Mordechai.  We also made crowns with stickers so we could be kings and queens.

Sensory table.
Our friends explored rice, and beans in our sensory table this week. Using funnels and bottles, they each created a gragger or noisemaker. We practiced shaking our graggers to make noise whenever they hear the name Haman.

During davening, we give tzedakah, but this week we talked about how this is one of the four mitzvos of Purim. We touched on the other three mitzvos: hearing the Megillah, sending food gifts to friends and hosting a festive meal. 

We had such a great time with spirit week this week, it was fun to see all of the creative outfits your children were wearing! Thanks for joining in the Purim fun!

See you on Monday for our Purim Costume Dress up Day, and hope to see you at the Purim Party on Tuesday too!

Shabbat Shalom!
Morah Ora.

Dear Peach Room Parents.

We began exploring Tu B'Shvat, or the New Year for Trees, this week. Friends have been working on an ongoing group project. They are creating their own Peach Room Family Tree. Everyday we add some more to our tree as we talk about the different parts of the tree- roots, trunk & bark, branches, and leaves. They explored different textures and mediums in this collage work. Our friends began by painting our cardboard tree all together. Then they added some bark that we found on our playground. We used sponges to create a tree-like texture and we glued some leaves that we collected outside.

In the sensory table this week  we had soil, beans and pots.  We were practicing to plant.

 As we do this we talk about all of the things that plants and trees need to grow healthy- soil, water and sunlight to make their own food.

Next week we are going to plants our own pots to see how beans or seeds grow in to something big .

At the table clay, playdoh and branches were set out for our friends to sculpt their own trees. Playing and molding clay can be extremely therapeutic for a child who needs to physically express their emotions. In addition, their fingers are working to strengthen their fine motor skills and dexterity while their brain is working on their imagination and creativity.

Shabbot Shalom!

Morah Ora