Letters all around

A look at this week:
Looking for little “i’s” dot, finding uppercase letters, “scribing” in Torahs, where else could we dive deep into looking at letters? This week we read all about letters and numbers as we focused on both the alphabet and numbers 0-7. The children looked in one of our books for little i’s dot, and just as we had to look for the dot in the story, they spent a lot of time going through our sensory bucket full of streamers to find capital letters that we then matched to our lowercase letter cards. On Thursday our own little “i” lost it’s dot and we searched the classroom to find it. How surprised we were when the dot actually popped out of the book that we were reading that day. It was all the children could talk about for a little while after the story. The children also made their own Torahs and then took time to write in them with feather and paint. And while all this was going on, they also matched Torah cut-outs to numbers on number cards, reinforcing their knowledge of one to one correspondence. We started learning a few poems about numbers to help us learn how to write our numbers more clearly. In home living and block area we also had the chance to experience Simchat Torah as we pretended to get ready for a parade and built an Ark for the Torah. And just to make the week even more interesting, we had the chance to shake the lulav and etrog and also eat lunch in the sukkah!

Conversations from the week:
With so many more one-on-one activities this week, I was unable to catch a conversation to relay here. However, it was very interesting to listen to the children as they helped each other match capital and lowercase letters, they talked about how many pretzels they had at snack time and they even talked about different sizes of items.

I think my favorite conversation that I overheard this week was when Levi was upset in the play area due to a little scooter accident. Throughout the rest of the play time, the other children kept asking Levi if he was ok. And, yes, of course he was! However, it was just so nice to know that we have a class full of caring friends that really do get concerned when one of the other friends is not happy!

A look at next week:
Next week we are starting our unit on the world. The room will start a slow transformation as we start to build the world within the classroom. We will be enjoying many fun, learning activities, including making our own class books as a spin-off of Eric Carle’s Today is Monday.