Making Charoset For our Seder!

Charoset is one of everyone's favorite dish for Passover. On Wednesday, all the children helped to make the charoset for our Passover Seder.  They  learned that charoset symbolizes the mortar that the Israelite slaves used with the bricks to build the pyramids.  As you can see from the pictures, the children used various motor skills and worked as a team to chop and dice our apples. After all the apples were cut, we stirred in grape juice and cinnamon sugar.   Then as all good cooks do, we tasted the charoset. It may look like mortar,but it tastes delicious!

Building A Pyramid

This week as we studied the story of Passover,we had the children build a pyramid using tape and their math skills.  The children knew that the pyramid should begin as a triangle,so Norah is showing Harriet where to put the second diagonal line.

Will illustrates how he would make a horizontal line in order to make the base of our pyramid.

The children have made the basic structure of the pyramid,but they know that they needed more lines in order to make the bricks of the pyramid.

Colin adds a horizontal line to begin making the bricks.

Zach is using gross motor skills as he reaches to make another horizontal line.

Calvin really had to stretch to add a horizontal line to the top of our pyramid.

Iya and Ben work together to make the first vertical line in our pyramid.

Alex and Lilly are discussing where they want to put their vertical line.

Evie added the horizontal lines that made our pyramid dimensional.

Everyone made a slave carrying a basket and bricks to put on our pyramid.  They used their knowledge of the Passover story to make some very sad faces on their slaves.  The children knew that the slaves were not happy about the hard work that they had to do for Pharaoh!

Happy Birthday Will!

      On Monday,April 4th, we celebrated Will's 5th birthday.  We sang our special birthday song as we danced around Will. We celebrate every child's birthday with this special song.  At the end of the song, each child pretends to be a candle, and then the birthday boy or girl makes  a wish and blows out each candle. Will's grandparents joined us for this fun birthday party.  We all enjoyed sharing Will's 5th birthday!!

If You Give a Curious George Child A Snake.....

       If you give a Curious George child a snake....In keeping with Laura Numeroff's delightful collection of children's books such as "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie?, we dedicate this blog to the adventurous spirit of our class !  If you give a Curious George child a snake, he/she will ask to see some lizards, frogs or a giant tortoise.  Why did they ask to see these particular reptiles?  Many of these reptiles live in the desert and what  better way to enrich our curriculum then to observe and explore these creatures first hand.  Lucky for us, Shelly had arranged for  Mr. Lewis, "The Snake Man", to bring all these creatures to pre - school on Tuesday.   He began by showing the children various reptiles and then he gave the children all sizes of snakes to hold.  At the end of the afternoon the children weren't the only expert snake handlers!

Name That Smell!

       During our study of the desert,we learned that snakes have talented tongues.  They use their forked tongues to smell. Snakes move their tongues up and down in order to pick up scents from the air and ground.  After learning these facts, we decided to conduct our own "smell" experiment. 
        Thanks to all our parents for helping us with this experiment by sending in a great variety of smells.  When we conducted our experiment, Rabbi Adam and Shelly came in to try their luck at naming the smells in the bottles.  The children enjoyed watching Rabbi Adam's and Shelly's reactions to some of the more  potent smells!  We passed all the bottles  around as the children sat on the rug, and we asked them not  to call out their guess until everyone had a turn to sniff each smell.  Then they separated the bottles  into groups.  The group with good smells had the largest number of bottles.  This experiment was  a great sensory experience for the children. They also applied their math skills as they counted the number of bottles  in each group and compared the groups  As a fun conclusion to our experiment, we  asked the children to move their tongues like a snake!

Happy Birthday Colin!

We celebrated Colin's birthday on Tuesday.  He was our last March birthday! Colin wanted brownies for his birthday,so the children made chocolate chip and fudge brownies.  After lunch, we had Colin's birthday celebration. His mom, dad, and little brother,Conrad joined us for a very fun 5th birthday!