Time flies when you're having fun

Almost every day when I ring the bell to announce that it's time to clean up for dismissal, the children chime "already?!" I love to use this opportunity to use the wise but worn adage, "time flies when you're having fun." And we are, indeed having fun. But, we are also working hard.

One of the best parts of the past week was finishing our small moments writing unit, which concluded with a writing celebration. After selecting one piece to publish, and fancying up the cover with stickers and assorted decorations, children proudly read their story aloud to a small group of half the class. Children listened attentively, gave compliments and begged to take the stories home immediately. (That wasn't my plan, but how could I say no?) I hope you have had a chance to listen to your child share his/her writing aloud. Tomorrow we will begin a science writing unit, with a particular focus on mushrooms and fungus. One highlight of this integrated science and writing unit will be a field trip to Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary on October 31. Expect an email soon about the details.

In Hebrew, we learned the names of a variety of fruits in Hebrew including apples, bananas, kiwi, lemons, grapes, and clementine. Many of these fruits have almost identical names in English and Hebrew, which allows us to focus on other new language at the same time, such as אני אוהב "ani ohev" (I like) and אני לא אוהב "ani lo ohev" (I don't like). Children also jumped from one picture of a fruit to another, allowing us to practice the prefixes  מ..m' (from) and ל l' (to).  Here's a video of some fruit vocabulary in Hebrew:

We studied the story of Adam, Chava/Eve and Gan Eden, the garden of Eden this week. One topic children wondered about was why God made the snake if it was going to do bad things (good question!) With all these types of questions, I remind children that there are no right or wrong answers when we interpret stories, whether they are from the Torah or from literature. The children have a lot of interesting and well thought out ideas; the only real limiting factor in our conversations is how long they can sit on the rug and attend to one another, which is challenging at this age.

We talked about the fact that the Torah doesn't tell us what kind of fruit was on the Tree of Knowledge, and that the Rabbis have come up with many different ideas about this tree. Midrashim identify the Tree as the fig, apple, pomegranate, etrog, carob, palm, nut tree, grape vine or wheat stalk. To represent this tradition, we created a tree covered with many different kinds of fruits, including those we've been learning about during Hebrew.

Our last butterfly hatched just 5 minutes before the start of the school day. Fortunately Morah Andrea was able to capture some of it on video and we watched it together later in the morning. Alas, it is too cold for our butterfly to begin a flight to Mexico, but Magic Wings agreed to care for him. If you visit the butterfly conservatory, maybe you'll see him!

Looking forward to meeting with all of you during conferences. This is our chance to touch base - to hear from you how the year is going for your child, and to share some of our initial observations. We send out complete progress reports in January.

See you tomorrow!