The Gan @ LGA: Days 4 and 5 in the Gan

It's hard to believe we've only been in school for four and a half days. The children are really starting to seem at home in the classroom - learning routines and expectations, and becoming a community of friends and learners. Here's some of how we spent our time.

On Monday, we watched a short video of a monarch caterpillar making a chrysalis. In fact, we watched it twice, so children had the chance to closely observe what was happening and share what they noticed. We watched the caterpillar shed its skin, and discovered that there was several curled up balls of shed skin on the bottom of our caterpillar tank. When we returned to the classroom we used our digital "microscope" (it's really more of a camera with 50x magnification) to look at the shed skin in really close detail. We could even see the stripes! Since then, the microscope has been a popular choice during explorations.

We added a new math routine - the counting jar - which is now a choice as students arrive in the morning, and had our first music class with Morah Zipporah, who joined us in our classroom to teach the song Modeh Ani, which means "I am thankful." Those of you with Spotify can listen to it here.

After lunch, rest and afternoon recess, we came inside for an art activity, exploring the many differnt ways to make lines with markers. Our work is hanging in the classroom and the hallway.

Today, we reinforced our knowledge of the monarch life cycle, while giving me a chance to teach safe scissor and tidy glue stick usage by creating our own life cycles to take home. Ask your child to explain his/hers to you. We also had our first gym class with Morah Kris - thanks to everyone for remembering sneakers. We extended our art activity from yesterday and practiced working and communicating with partner by making shared marker drawings - these came out beautifully and we attached them to make one very long poster.

One of my favorite parts of this week so far has been our visit from Rabbi Riqi Kosovske, who came to introduce children to the Torah. Today wasn't a day for talking about what the Torah is or isn't, but simply experiencing this special book. Here are the children preparing to observe the Torah, and then with the scroll on their laps.