Butterflies, Torahs and Wheat, Oh My!

During the second half of the week, we continued our study of monarchs with a read aloud about the migration many monarch butterflies make to Mexico. In the book "Gotta Go, Gotta Go," the caterpillar repeats over and over again "I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go to Mexico." And finally, she turns into a butterfly and sets of on her way. We also watched a video about the migration, the Reading Rainbow episode "Bugs" which shows some spectacular footage of the millions of monarchs perched thick on Oyamel fir trees.

The biggest news of the week, was, of course, the emergence of our first monarch butterfly from its chrysalis. She hatched at 8 am and the morning and spent the day drying her wings. At the end of the day, we released her to begin her long journey to Mexico.

We also continued our introduction to Torah by visiting the synagogue and looking closely at the Torah scrolls both in and out of the ark. After our visit, children had a chance to do some drawings of an open Torah scroll back at school - these are on display in the hallway with their comments. We're working on determining what all Torah scrolls have in common, and how they differ from other books.

In math, we created our own class version of the book 10 Black Dots, and the children enjoyed reading the class copy so much we made one for each child to take home. We also explored unifix cubes and geoboards, while continuing the routines of the counting jar and counting days of school, and adding the daily routine of calendar.

We've been playing lots of games - cooperation games, in which the whole class tried to fit in one hula hoop, and "keep it up" when they tried to keep a balloon from hitting the ground - and listening games - guess who is speaking? clap the beats (syllables) in our names? and pass the whisper (telephone.) The ability to listen closely and carefully is the foundation of developing as readers and writers, and the ability to cooperate is the foundation of, well, everything!

We spend the whole year with the sixth graders, kitah vav, as our buddy class. We'll do many planned activities with them as well as lunch time once or twice a week. This week, after baking our weekly challah, we had a chance to plant wheat at abundance farm with our buddies, who then joined us for our shabbat party/Kabbalat Shabbat. If you "like" LGA on facebook, you probably saw these photos of our challah bakers, hard at work. (If you are on FB, and haven't liked LGA yet, please do!)

A few more photos from the past few days: