Welcome Kylan, Amanut and "We Are the Dinosaurs!"

Dear Families,

We have been delighted to welcome Kylan Guinn and his family to the Owls class! We are all so excited to get to know them. The Owls have enjoyed finding their new cubby spaces, as we moved things around a bit to accommodate the addition to our community.

On Tuesday this week, we happily explored the new Amanut, or Art Studio, at the Trust Center. This new space has been carefully set up to nurture the children’s explorations of process-based art. It is fun for the children to do crafts in the classroom, and we often teach important content and skills this way. However, young children benefit greatly from the opportunity to create and express their own ideas freely with variable mediums. On Tuesday, we experimented with crayons at the easel. The children also used a large piece of butcher paper taped to the floor to create a large collaborative mural. It was wonderful to find Shayna and Noah working together to carefully illustrate and label some of their favorite characters from Toy Story 3. Many of the children also explored the collage bank. Matthew and Nicholas discovered two different ways to make birds. Matthew used feathers while Nicholas used popsicle sticks!

On Thursday, we welcomed Rhonda Solomon, a Guest Reader from the Temple Ohabei Shalom Sisterhood. She brought two Purim books to read to the children: It’s Purim Time! By Latifa Berry Kropf, and When It’s Purim, by Edie Stoltz Zolkower, and donated them to our growing TCEE collection. Mrs. Solomon also brought us hamantaschen to taste at snack time. It was a delight to get to know her, and we happily wished her “todah rabah,” or thank you very much.

We continued our study of dinosaurs this week, focusing on learning about some of our favorite species. We have learned that some dinosaurs were plant-eaters and that others were meat-eaters. We have also noticed the different ways that different species of dinosaurs moved – either on two feet or on four feet. We had a lot of fun moving around like dinosaurs during the indoor movement time afforded to us by some of the rainy and very cold days this week. The children took turns choosing various pictures of dinosaurs, and then finding ways to move their bodies like them. It is hard for us to move around on four feet, like stegosaurus or triceratops, but a great opportunity for the children to develop their core strength.

Another highlight of the week was pretending to be paleontologists, excavating toy dinosaurs out of the ice cubes in which Morah Larissa and Morah Kate froze them. The children used eye-droppers to melt their ice cubes and free their dinosaurs. This was a lot of fun, but also a great way to teach science concepts (such as paleontology, excavation, fossils, as well as ice/water and melting) while building children’s fine motor strength. Small eye-droppers are a great way to build the hand strength necessary for children to become writers.

We have also been enjoying a new favorite song: “We are the Dinosaurs,” by The Laurie Berkner Band (click on the video to hear the song). We love marching around the room pretending to be dinosaurs! In addition, the children have loved playing with the nest that they made before vacation. They take turns pretending to be baby dinosaurs hatching from eggs, or adult dinosaurs sitting on a nest. On Friday this week, we will read a book from Jane Yolen’s popular series about dinosaurs, How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? Then, we will write our own book, titled, How Do Dinosaurs Celebrate Shabbat?

This week, we have focused on some of the literacy and mathematical skills that support children in collecting and organizing information. We have talked about what kind of words we use in a question. The children have learned that questions are words we use to talk about things that we wonder about, and things that we don’t know yet. The children have each practiced asking a question before reading non-fiction books about dinosaurs. It is fun to find the answers inside our books!

We have also introduced Venn Diagrams this week. We used hula hoops to make a Venn diagram with our bodies, and we discovered who has brothers, sisters, both, or none. We also created a Venn diagram with our toy dinosaurs, and compared and contrasted the ways that they move.

Finally, we have continued to build on our graphing skills this week. The children have learned that a graph is a chart that we can use to find out how many people like or do not like something. We created a graph about our favorite dinosaurs. Stegosaurus and iguanodon were two favorites! Finally, we also used graph paper with some of our manipulative toys, to compare and contrast them by various attributes including color and shape.

Shabbat Shalom,

Morah Larissa and Morah Kate