myGanBlog: The World is Growing All Around Us

A look at this week:
This week started with clouds, both inside and out, and will end with people on the wall and celebrating Shabbat. We have started our look at the world! And what goes better with talking about the world than talking about weather, especially when the weather is making a change outside? On Monday we painted our world for our mitzvah notes. And by Tuesday we were able to start putting our mitzvah notes up around the world. In the meantime, we also started to develop a mural wall about the world. The children created clouds on Monday. Tuesday we added a tree, grass, flowers and water. On Wednesday we added the sun, moon and stars. On Thursday we added some fish and birds and on Friday we will add people! It has been enjoyable to watch this wall develop over the week and to just hear the pleasure the children get from seeing the new parts added each day! While working on this we also made a class book. We talked a little about the days of the week and so we made a book where the children had to fill in the blanks to “Today is ________. _________ _________.” It was interesting to talk about what we could put for each day. Each child was able to make one page of the book. They chose the day they wanted to do and what activity they wanted for that page. Then they copied the words onto their paper. One of the most interesting parts of working with children on book pages like this is seeing how they write on their own and how they write with guidance and directions from me. While working on math, we had the chance to play with dice and talk about numbers as we matched cut out worlds to the numbers on a die and then wrote that number on a paper. The children are learning poems about how to make their numbers, and this is already proving useful in the number writing process! We also played in the sand table this week! Although the block area and the home living area were open to either build part of the world or pretend to travel, the children were really enthralled with the other world activities that we had available. We also met Wally, our weather dog. The children have already started dressing him for the weather and we are also graphing the weather, talking about what the weather was yesterday and today and predicting tomorrow’s weather.

Conversations from the week:
It was so nice that a few of our friends were concerned when some of the children were out sick this week. It was nice to hear the children ask if the others were ok and they were also telling me how much they missed their sick friends.

While at lunch this week, I overheard a very short conversation that was fun.

Jayden: She has candy.
Josh: Candy is really yummy!
Avery (while eating a piece of chocolate after finishing part of her lunch): Candy is not good for you. It is bad for your teeth!

I just had to laugh when I heard this conversation, especially as I looked at Avery with the chocolate all around her mouth and a big smile as she explained how candy was bad for you.

A look at next week:
While we continue to work on the world, we are going to move to a specific part of the world and start talking about the rainforest. You may notice a small change in one of the extra rooms we use as the environment in that room will be altered due to the theme. As we make this theme come alive in the classroom, I would also like ask that if anyone has any empty paper towel rolls, can you please send them in. We would like to use these to make rainmakers in the next two weeks. We would really appreciate it! Thank you!