Hatching Chicks in Ganon Aleph

After picking up some fertilized eggs at Goffle Road Poultry Farm in Wyckoff, we brought an incubator into our classroom and gently placed the eggs inside.  The children patiently waited for the eggs to hatch, and sure enough, by Tuesday they began hatching!  A couple of days later, we were the proud parents of nine baby chicks!!  They stayed in the warm incubator for a while until their feathers dried, and now they are living in a box with a special light to keep them warm.  We take them out for "playdates", and the children are having a lot of fun with them!  They know that it is important to be gentle with them, and to make sure that they always have food and water.

Baby Ducks Visit Ganon Aleph

 

Jakob and Ezra's mom and little brother came to our class with the baby ducks they have been raising at home.  They showed us pictures of the incubator the duck eggs hatched in, and the boys explained how they take care of them.  We fed them some cracker crumbs, and we even put them in a basin of water and watched them take a bath!  The children are looking forward to hatching our own baby chicks in our classroom incubator in a couple of weeks!

Pat's Pals Return to ECD

Pat Rose came to visit us on Wednesday with some of her little friends.  She came earlier in the year to talk about how different animals adjust to the winter, and this time she showed us what the animals do in the springtime.  Among the furry friends (and some not so furry) that accompanied her were:  Smoke the chinchilla and her two-week old baby, a lamb named Lilly,  Freddie the frog, some baby chicks, a ball python snake, and Miss Charlotte the parrot who performed some really neat tricks!  Mrs. Rose talked about some differences between mammals and cold-blooded animals, and showed the children some eggs laid by birds, snakes, and frogs.  What a fun, hands-on way to learn about animals in the springtime!

Gan Aleph "Flips" for Chanukah!!!

It smelled so delicious today in Gan Aleph. Meir's mommy, Ruchi Abboudi, graciously spared some time to come in to fry latkes with our class. The children peeled and cut and grated the potatoes and onions. They mixed it together with eggs and finally Meir's mommy helped the children fry them in oil. The smell was so delicious it wafted all the way through the halls of Yavneh. The children could not wait to eat them. What a yummy activity for Chanukah time! Happy Chanukah!

Learning about Life Cycles in Gan Aleph

"Frogs here, frogs there, frogs were jumping everywhere!" Gan Aleph decided to learn about frogs and wanted to know more about where they came from. We began with an activity in which the children were presented with pictures of Morah Aviva, from birth until now. They were challanged to put these pictures in the proper sequence, bearing in mind the natural order of one's life. For example, the children knew that her kindergarten picture would be placed after some baby pictures but before her wedding picture. After putting all of these pictures in order (and laughing while looking at some of them!) we went through Morah Aviva's life cycle thus far. We learned that living things have stages in their lives which led us to explore a frog's life cycle.

The children were provided with more pictures, this time of the different stages in a frog's life. They worked together to put the pictures in the proper order, and learned that frogs start off as eggs. The egg hatches into a tadpole which then grows into a froglet and ultimately a frog!

We read the book If You Hopped Like Frog, by David Shwartz and recreated his book with our own ideas and frogs jumping off the page! Through this book ,we learned that frogs can jump a distance of 20 times its body length! We took turns jumping on a number line to see how far we could jump and compared it to a frog's jumping abilities!

Frogs here, Frogs there, Frogs were jumping everywhere...Especially in Gan Aleph!!!!