Hello Purple Room Families,

What a wonderful week! So much learning is happening. 

Jewish Learning: Hachnasat Orchim

In this week’s parsha, Vayeira, we learned about Avraham and Sarah welcoming important messengers from Hashem to their home. This teaches us about the mitzvah of Hachnasat Orchim: welcoming guests. The Purple Room practiced Hachnasat Orchim in the Dramatic Play center, pretending to prepare food for guests and invite them in, just like Avraham and Sarah did.

 

We had a chance to practice hachnasat orchim! We invited the Peach Room to be our guests. The Purple Room talked about how we would welcome guests and prepare for their visit. The children agreed we should prepare a snack for the Peach Room and put away any items that would be unsafe for toddlers. We used kid chef knives to cut fruit and vegetables (real-life fine motor skills!). We put away scissors and loose parts, and covered up shelves that we didn’t want our Peach Room guests to touch.

 

Finally, our guests arrived! We served them our snacks, said a bracha together, and enjoyed each others’ company.

 

Aleph Bet Learning

We started off the year with an aleph bet circle time, but the Purple Room students like to MOVE! To meet their needs, we have incorporated a lot more full body movement into our learning. Here Morah Shaina leads an aleph bet racing game. The children run as fast as they can to match the letters! 

 

Math Learning

This week we introduced the ten frame: a math tool with 10 boxes divided into two sections of five each. This tool helps students visualize the relationships between numbers within 10, a necessary foundation for working in the base-ten system. Our ten frames are sturdy fabric ones to withstand outdoor learning. The Purple Room collected beautiful rocks that they were very excited to use for these lessons. The ten frames allow us to easily differentiate learning for many different levels of understanding. Using the same tools, one student might be working on one-to-one correspondence while another is learning to visualize addition within 10.

 

Board games are a wonderful way to incorporate social-emotional and academic learning. This is “Count Your Chickens,” a cooperative game. Students learn turn-taking and good sportsmanship while practicing their math skills. As they play, the morahs can observe students’ progress with counting, subitizing, and simple addition. Who understands that lining up the counters is a more efficient way to count? Who can glance at a pile of counters and say “that’s five” without counting? Who lands on a “plus one” spot and immediately knows how many chickens to collect without counting?

Literacy Learning

The Purple Room is having a lot of fun learning letter formation using the Wet-Dry-Try method. This method was developed by Handwriting Without Tears, a fabulous OT-created program that promotes multi-sensory learning. In Wet-Dry-Try, a teacher first writes a letter with chalk, saying the letter formation aloud (This being CJP, we sing it!). Then the student erases along the same lines with a wet sponge, dries along the same lines with a paper towel, and finally tries on their own with a small piece of chalk. This reinforces the letter formation sequence because the child is going through the motions several times to erase, dry, and then copy the letter. This also provides strong visual cues and builds confidence, because you can always see a faint outline of the letter. Using tiny bits of chalk or sponge promotes a “tripod grip” in a gentle way.

Doing Wet-Dry-Try for English and Hebrew letters.

This is just a small sample of what we do each week. There is so much learning happening in the Purple Room! When you come in for parent teacher conferences next week, you will be able to see our Documentation Board detailing our investigation of dragonflies. We look forward to seeing you, and hope you have a peaceful shabbat.

Love, 

Morah Shoshi & Morah Shaina