Grape Class

Dear Purple Room families,

This week we celebrated Shepherd’s birthday! Happy Birthday, Shepherd! It was so wonderful to celebrate with you.

It is amazing to see how much the children have grown over the course of the year. We see this in ways large and small each day. One way we noticed growth this week was with our obstacle course. At the beginning of year, the morahs used to plan an obstacle course for the children to use energy safely in the classroom. As the year progressed, we released this responsibility to the children, creating a classroom job of “Ninja Course Coordinator.” The Ninja Course Coordinator plans an obstacle course for the class with teacher supervision. This week, the children were playing obstacle course, and developed indoor and outdoor games together that required coordination and communication. They planned courses together, discussed how to do it safely and take turns, and then started writing and drawing plans of their courses to remember the order of steps. This combined so many of the skills we have worked on this year: pre-writing, communication, sharing, using a strong voice to express your opinion and using listening ears to hear what your friend says.

Making the obstacle course maps. The children are counting the chair legs they drew.

An outdoor obstacle course that requires the last person to lift the back chair and hand it to the front person to keep the course going

Jewish Learning and Math Learning: Counting the Omer

Each day between Passover and Shavuot, we count the Omer, 49 days. We are counting up until we receive the Torah on Shavuot! The Purple Room imagined what it would have been like to receive the Torah on Har Sinai. We talked about what it means that the “whole world was quiet” right before we received the Torah. Why do you think it was quiet?

Some ideas from the children:

“Because the Torah is special.”

“To listen to Hashem’s words. If it’s quiet we can hear.”

“Hashem was giving us the Torah because Hashem loves us.”

“Because the Jewish people need to let Hashem talk sometimes.”

In the Purple Room, we count the Omer each day after davening. We use the hundreds chart to count up to that day’s number in Hebrew and English. We use a little hundreds chart– and a really big one the size of our whole rug! The children enjoy finding patterns on the hundreds chart after we count, and identifying “really big” numbers.

Literacy Learning: Hebrew and English