The week of November 28

Last week we completed our writing unit on descriptive language. Children spent two days revising one piece from the month of November - they asked themselves "how can I make this even better?" Some students added whole pages, others added "flaps", some added more details to their pictures, and some children corrected the spelling of high frequency words. I think they could have gone on for days, revising and revising, but then, when would we have had our party? Instead, we called revisions to a halt on Thursday, and "fancied up" finished pieces in preparation for Friday's writing celebration. Several teachers joined the Gan to listen to children read their stories aloud and to enjoy our delicious cookies.

In Torah, we continued the story of Noah, with a focus on the covenant of the rainbow. We  used this opportunity to explore the colors of the rainbow, and to experiment with the mixing of primary colors. We made some beautiful rainbow art, both by mixing oil pastels and mixing markers on coffee filter paper. Some children also worked on mixing colors on the light box with fingerpaint. (Also some teachers. It was a lot of fun.) For an extra treat, we mixed red, blue and yellow cookie dough and baked rainbow cookies for our writing celebration. All of this discussion of colors led to a study of how to read and spell the names of colors, and we learned the following poem:
Orange is a carrot,
Yellow is a pear,
Green is the grass,
And brown is a bear,
Purple is a plum,
Blue is the sky,
Black is a witch's hat,
And red is cherry pie.

In math we played some math games to reinforce teen numbers, and worked with measurement of volume. We also sorted money, as we counted our tzedakah from the month of November. We had enough to buy four birthday boxes for the Northampton Survival Center in honor of our November birthdays (Aliya and Morah Amy) which we will deliver this week after the children have had a chance to decorate the boxes.

Over the next few weeks we'll be learning about Chanukah, continuing to build our repertoire of high frequency words, and write our own books for the classroom library. Stay tuned for next week's blog post!