December 12, 2014

Dear Families,
We are getting ready for Chanukah in
Pre-K Lavan! The children have been very
interested in the Chanukah story and
enjoy retelling what happened with the
Jews and the Greeks. They made
costumes to act out the Chanukah story.

This week, the children enjoyed creating

their own chanukiyot. They have been
interested in making their own colors at
the easel, so now the children were able
to make their own colors with water and
liquid water colors for their chanukiyot.
First, we made recipes of how to make every color. The children counted how many drops
they needed of each color to make a new one.

After we wrote down all of our recipes, the children used sentence strips with 8 spaces
to think about what color they wanted each of their jars to be. They used markers and
dot markers to show each color. They were then able to use these sentence strips as a
guide to make the colors for their jars.

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They lined up the 8 jars and one by one created
each color. They used water jugs to fill up the jars half way, then used droppers for the
liquid water colors, and mixed it with a straw to see what color they had created. Once
they were finished, they were happy to see all of the jars with their own colors. They are

excited to use their chanukiyot during Chanukah. We have been practicing the 3 brachot
that we say when we light the Chanukah candles.

In half groups, we looked at pictures of different types of chanukiyot and talked about
what is the same and what is different about them. We learned that there are chanukiyot
of different sizes and materials but they all have nine branches, one for every night and
one for the shamash. We also saw that sometimes the shamash is right in the middle, and
sometimes its on the side but there is always something different about it that lets us
know its the shamash.

In small groups, we used candles to draw on white paper and then colored over it with
watercolors. We learned that the wax from the candle repels the water. The children
were excited to see what drawing would show up as they were painting with watercolors.
We also sorted different colored candles and sevivonim.

This week in Hebrew we are preparing for Chanukah with a direct attention to the
singular and plural forms of the holiday symbols ( - ,-) . The students
used spinners with holiday symbols to explore these. We are strengthening our use of
colors by gender and in plurals (- , -) . The students also used a second
spinner alongside the first to say complete phrases ( ,) . During small
group time, the children used props to recreate the story of The Dreidel that Went to
Sleep (
) a story that introduces furniture and prepositions.

We were so excited to celebrate Jack E. and Jack K.s birthday on Wednesday. Thank you
to their families for coming to our classroom and bringing special gifts for our class.

On Friday we gathered together with the other Pre-K classes for our Shabbat Party.
This weeks Parasha is Parashat Vayeshev. We learned the story of Josephs dreams and
about his coat of many colors.

Looking ahead:
We will continue learning about Chanukah.
Mothers Visiting Day will be on Wednesday, December 17th at 9:00 am.
Next week is the green weeks turn for show and tell: Olivia, Rae, Sadie, and Sari.
Please bring in your show and tell on Monday.

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom,

Morah Ruthy, Morah Sara, and Moreh Yonatan