Kindergarten Blog 5/20

Dear Kindergarten Families,

This week has been so eventful! We baked challah, our caterpillars formed chrysalises, we celebrated Lag B’Omer in the park, and we had our Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony!

In Science, we are continuing to sketch our caterpillars, and on Wednesday, we made an extremely exciting discovery: many of our caterpillars have formed chrysalises, the third stage of a butterfly’s life cycle! We watched a 3-minute time lapse video that showed a caterpillar forming and leaving its chrysalis and then we got to transfer our chrysalises to their butterfly enclosure so that when they emerge, they’ll have room to fly.

In General Studies we supported the Kabbalat Shabbat program by baking Challah!  Children each baked two Challah rolls for their Shabbat Boxes and each group braided a full loaf for the ceremony.  We had fun mixing the dough, punching it down, braiding and baking it. 

In Reading we talked about another strategy, Skip and Return.  This is where you come to a word you don’t know and skip over it to see if the rest of the sentence and the picture help you out.  Children had a chance to go Book Shopping again, returning the books they know how to read and choosing new ones.

We have also started our first chapter book read aloud, Ramona the Pest. Children sympathize with Ramona as she starts her first day of Kindergarten, which involves some excitement, some confusion, and a little bit of getting into trouble!

In Hebrew/Judaics, we have been perfecting our performance for our ceremony, and putting the finishing touches on our Shabbat books and boxes to share with you. We have also been preparing for Lag B’Omer, Yom Sport, which took up the entire day on Thursday. Each day, we counted in Hebrew the day in Omer we were up to, and learned some vocabulary associated with the holiday: medurah, esh, krashim, rikud.

At the park, we did relays, tag, a dance party, and generally enjoyed a school-wide event. When we came back to school, the children watched A Toy Story (the first in-school movie we’ve seen all year)!

Of course, the highlight of the week was Kabbalat Shabbat. The kids have been working so hard on this performance and on their Shabbat projects. They are real Shabbat experts!

Shabbat Shalom,

Atalya, Dawn, and Anat