Cooking with Apples in Ganon Aleph

The children were busy peeling and chopping apples this morning for our delicious applesauce and apple muffins. We bake and cook throughout the year, and the children always prepare, measure, and count the ingredients themselves. There are a lot of math and science skills involved with the preparations. Learning is always fun and delicious in early childhood!!

Gan Gimmel Is BUZZING With Activity

Gan Gimmel is "buzzing" with activity. The children enjoyed "flying" around while listening to "The Flight of the Bumblebee" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. They also had an opportunity to create yellow and black pictures while listening to the music.

The class observed that honeycomb cells are six sided and have six corners. Gan Gimmel learned that this shape is a hexagon. Using craft sticks, each child built a hexagon which they collaged with black and yellow materials. Although each cell was identical in shape, it was unique in design.

BZZZ!

Human Hexagons in Gan Bet!

How many sides does a hexagon have? Ask the children in Gan Bet and they'll show you by using their bodies! The children in Gan Bet have been noticing many details about honeycombs, most especially their shape. The children became human honeycombs by re-creating the hexagon shapes as they lay down on the floor and made their bodies into horizontal and vertical lines to form a hexagon together. They worked in groups using great co-operative skills to work out forming themselves into the shapes. What a great way to reinforce the characteristics of the hexagon!

How The Rosh Hashana Challah Became Round

Every Shabbat we eat challah. Did you ever notice the shape? Most of our challot are braided and are long like a rectangle. On Rosh Hashsana, our challot are circular to symbolize the circle of life and the start of a new year. We read the book How The Rosh Hashana Challahs Became Round, by Sylvia Epstein and decided to bake our very own circle challot for Rosh Hashana. We measured, poured, kneaded and rolled long snakes to create our circular challot. We hope you enjoy eating them as much as we enjoyed making them!

Gan Aleph's Amazing Apples!

If you walk down the halls of Yavneh and heard some children munching and crunching, it was probably the sound of Gan Aleph tasting apples! This week, Gan Aleph learned aboutapples through literacy, science, math, movement and of course it did not go without some special snacks (like apple jacks)!We learned about apple trees and how they change through the different seasons. After reading The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons, the children made their own apple tree seasons book! They used different art materials to depict what the apple tree looks like during the seasons of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

We played an apple matching game in which the children had to match upper case and lower case letters to complete a full apple shape.

The children tasted red, yellow and green apples and decided which one they liked the best. We wrote about it and we used our math skills to graph their apple choice in a bar graph.

We predicted what would happen if we left a sliced apple out in the classroom. The children will soon begin to see the apple

changing and drying out! When the apple turns dry we will talk

about dried fruit and taste dried apples and apple chips!

We painted trees to go with our apple writings! We encourage you to come visit our outside bulletin board where you will see these beautiful apples!

As Gan Aleph sits down to their table to dip their apples in honey, they will surely be able to tell you some amazing facts about apples! What a delicious week this was!

Busy as Bees in Ganon Aleph

The children have been learning all about bees and how honey is made. They created their own beehive number matching games to bring home. First, they used their fine motor skills to cut out beehive shapes, then they used paint rollers to decorate them, and finally, they used their fingerprints to make little bees on craft sticks for matching the numbers one through ten. What a fun way to practice math skills!

Gan Gimmel Gets Going!!

Gan Gimmel is off to a great start! After doing Hebrew calendar, the children realized that Rosh Hashana is just two weeks away! We have tapuchim in our room; one was adom and one was yarok. After finding many things in the room that were adom, yarok and tzahov, the children got a chance to paint at the easel with those colors.


Ezra, Aidan and Noam are getting to know each other as they drive through town using our emergency vehicles. What is your child's favorite thing in our classroom so far?

Rosh Hashana Through Our 5 Senses

Ganon Bet has been busy learning all about Rosh Hashana, what better way to do it than through our senses! We had a chance to use our sense of touch discovering various objects that relate to Rosh Hashana such as shofarot, honey dishes, apples, 2 round challahs, and our fuzzy friend Devora the bee. After learning the hebrew vocabulary for an apple (tapuach), honey (dvash), and bee (devora) we each had a chance to create our very own honey dish. Some of us chose to make an apple and others chose to make a bee. We started with strips of plaster which we dipped in water. We had to cover our dishes and make sure they were smooth. The wet plaster felt ooey and gooey. We can't wait until they dry and we can paint them and finish creating our apples and bees!

First Days

Our first few days of school have been terrific! In every classroom, children are busy learning new routines and making new friends. They've been exploring the exciting centers that their teachers have prepared for them and taking charge of our wonderful outdoor play space. They are finding that school is a fun and safe place to be!