Transportation Week

Dear Families,

We continued to have a blast studying transportation in the Owl Room this week! At the art table, the children transformed old egg cartons into trains. They each selected a name for their train. We made Circus Trains, the TGV (the French high speed train), and even the T. Another big hit at the art table this week was making train whistles using paper towel tubes and waxed paper. As you can see, we make great use out of recycled items. Please feel free to share your own recycling with us – we are always looking for “beautiful junk.”

We played a few new fun inside games this week. “Car, Car, Truck,” a variation on “Duck, Duck, Goose,” was a fun way for the children to get moving and to practice with turn-taking. The children also enjoyed making a “train” with the classroom chairs, and using tickets with numbers to find the right seat. This was a fun way for the children to practice counting using one-to-one correspondence (counting an item accurately while pointing to it). We are also practicing vocabulary words for ordinal numbers, such as “first,” “second,” and “third.”

Some new songs and poems also addressed this week’s theme. We sang “T-R-A-I-N,” to the tune of “B-I-N-G-O.” This is a fun way to practice letter recognition. We have begun to reinforce for the children the sounds that correspond with each letter. For example, before eliminating “T” when singing the song, we might note aloud that T makes a /T/ sound. We also learned a new poem about a train, “Engine on the Track.” This was a great opportunity to point out rhyming words, such as “train” and “rain” and to introduce the concept that rhyming words “sound alike.” Morah Kate and the children had great fun teaching Morah Larissa “Hinei Rakevet,” an Israeli folk song about trains that the children learned last year.

Learning about vehicles that travel such long distances was a great opportunity for us to learn and practice “T’filat HaDerech,” the prayer said before taking a long journey.

We have also begun to discuss with the children the environmental consequences of vehicles. We have talked about how we often need to ride in cars, trains, planes, and boats. But overusing these vehicles is not good for the Earth! We talked about how cars create air pollution that is not good for trees and animals. The children learned that we can perform the mitzvah of repairing the Earth by sometimes choosing to walk or ride bikes when possible. During the weeks to come, we would love for you to help the children to perform this mitzvah and to share it with the class! We will hang a poster outside the Owl classroom for you and your child to write down places that you have gone to by walking or riding bicycles instead of driving. It will be wonderful for the children to learn about each other’s experiences.

Morah Larissa will look forward to speaking with all of you by phone over the next week or two to check in about the children’s adjustment to the preK class and their growth and development. Please feel free to let us know at drop off or pick up if there is a particularly good time to chat, or if there are particular concerns that you are having.

Thank you all, and Shabbat Shalom.

-Morah Larissa and Morah Kate