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

Blending sounds in the “-at” word family

Finding matching letters 

Finding rhyming pictures

We hope you have a marvelous Shabbat!

Morah Shoshi and Morah Athena

 

 

 

 

Dear Purple Room Families,

    It’s almost Pesach! The Purple Room is enjoying learning about this holiday in so many ways. For this week’s newsletter, we’d like to focus on some of the play the children have developed to explore the holiday.

The children were very interested in the mud bricks which the Jewish people had to make for Pharaoh in Egypt. We learned about how bricks are made, and the children played at making their own bricks in the outdoor learning space. They asked if we could also make bricks in the classroom, so we had a class meeting about bringing mud work inside. How could we play with mud and also keep our room clean? Make sure everyone has a turn? We decided on rules about mud, and wrote them up near the sensory table.

We brought in dirt and tools, and the children began to experiment with precisely how to make mud bricks. How much sand? How much water? How much dirt? Several of our trials didn’t work and crumbled. But some held! We built buildings and cities with these bricks in our sensory table.

We had also been watching videos and reading about how matzah is made. Some of the children began to pretend that their mud mixtures were matzah dough, not bricks. They talked to the Morahs about what kinds of tools and materials we would need to make “mudzah.”

The children found weeds that look like wheat. They gathered them and “ground” them with rocks. (Also, lots of mud was required for this process!)

They sifted dirt to get the “softest flour dirt” for the matzah, and discarded the rocks.

They cooperated with each other, taking turns to get water and discussing how much to add. Is the dough to thin? Too thick? Just right?

They asked the Morahs for flour, which we added to the batter. 

Quick! Get it rolled out so we can finish in 18 minutes!

We poked holes in the matzah before “baking” it.

Matzah, baking in our "oven."

Next week, we get to make real matzah with Rabbi Deitsch! The Purple Room will be ready!

Shabbat Shalom,

Morah Shoshi and Morah Athena