myGanBlog: Tzedakah, Tzedakah, Tzedakah...

that is what we give; to the poor people, to help them live.

A look at this week:

We have been very busy with our money this week. Some children took time to make their own silver coins (out of aluminum foil) in our art center by tracing cups and cutting out the circles. Others really enjoyed going to home living to fill the tzedakah box and then pretend to give it to people in need. Of course when you think about money, math comes into mind. We did talk about how much the different coins were worth and we read stories about money. But we also sorted coins, filled metal tzedakah boxes and then listened to them shake to see if we could figure out which one had more money in it. The children also wrote a book page about money and made their own tzedakah boxes out of recycle materials. And at the end of many of the days we had the chance to do tzedakah races. I think jumping was one of the favorite ways to get from one end of the room to the other to put their plastic pennies into the tzedakah boxes before coming back to the line.

Listening in to the conversations:

This week it was fun to listen to the children talk about money. They all really enjoyed the opportunity to play with money and learn a little more about it. On Monday I showed the children that if they used a magnifying glass, they could look at the back of a penny and see the statue of Abraham Lincoln. Throughout the rest of the week they were excited to tell me that they were able to find "the man" on the back of the penny!

We have kept our grass heads here to watch them grow a little more. It has been fun to heard all the excitement when they get to go over and see their grass growing!

A look at next week:

The next holiday that we will be talking about is Purim (a celebration of the Jewish salvation from the Persian Empire). We will be spending three weeks talking about things that surround Purim. Next week while having a little discussion about the story of Purim we are actually going to focus more on the community. We will work with Purim characters on a felt board but we are also going to make a small town out of boxes and use our characters in the town as well!

A Planting Update:

We have a few items growing in our classroom...items we want growing! First our cat grass is doing very well. i do think there is one cup that hasn't shown as much growth as the others, but all the others have at least 2 stalks of cat grass growing.

Next, we took grapes and put them in to cups in the window sill to see if we can make raisins. As much as we are not sure if this experiment will really work, we noticed that many of the grapes are starting to wrinkle!

And the finally growing project included taking corn seeds, cantaloupe seeds, cucumber seeds and garden bean seeds and planting them into egg cartons. We have started growth on the corn seeds and the garden bean seeds! It was very exciting to make that discovery today!