Rosh Hashanah - Shana Tova!

Documentation for the week of September 26-30, 2016

Completing Our Tzedakah Project

Our first field trip of the year was a huge success! Before we left for the grocery store, we needed to make sure we had enough money to pay for our apples. Morah Tara and Morah Mirele helped the children place enough coins onto the correct pictures so that we could count how many dollars we had. We then put $1.00 worth of coins in each ziploc bag. We counted nine bags, which meant that we had $9.00 to bring with us.

Thank you to Morah Shternie for joining us! We went over field trip rules at Morning Meeting on Monday: hold hands, listen to instructions, look with your eyes. We have started our safety commitments as children come into our classroom in the morning. This has been a very nice change for us, because our time spent davening has been getting too long for their attention spans. Please feel free to assist or watch your child commit to being safe with their safe keeper card. Asking the children to commit to being safe each morning and reminding them of their commitment throughout the day has been extremely beneficial. It allows them to feel responsible for the safety of our classroom and the choices that they are making each day. We repeat to the children regularly: It's your job to be safe. It's our job to keep you safe. This practice definitely influenced their excellent choices on field trip day! When we got to a stop light, Morah Tara reminded them: It's your job to be safe. It's our job to keep you safe. Then she asked, "How can we be safe crossing the street?" Lucy told us to wait for the hand to go away and cross when it turns white. Morah Shternie also taught the children a song about stop lights!

We walked together to Albertsons, and then we stopped for a drink of water outside the store. Once we walked inside, we needed to stop and wait for Todd, the produce manager to show us around. The children were also great at waiting: a challenging task when you are so excited to be out of school and surrounded by interesting items! Morah Mirele led the children in Rosh Hashanah songs while we waited for Todd. Here are the lyrics to the songs we have been singing over the past few weeks:

Dip the apple
in the honey
make a bracha
loud and clear.

L'Shana Tova
Oomisukah.
Have a happy
sweet new year.
_________________________________

Ani l'dodi
v'dodi li
I love Hashem
and Hashem loves me.

This is what the month of Elul
is all about:
to greet the king in the field
when he comes out.

Once our new friend, Todd, came to greet us, we started to look for apples. We found them in a few different places! We eventually made our way to the apples that were in bags. Before we bought our apples, Todd let each child choose an apple to take home with them! This continued to happen throughout our time at the grocery store: every time we saw a new employee they had something to give to us! We took our apples and were shown into the back of the grocery store to the break room. Everyone was able to eat a snack that they chose earlier to bring along. Once we finished our snacks, we went back to the bags of apples to see if we had enough money to buy them. The bags of apples were $3.99. We asked the children if they wanted to donate red apples or green apples. They voted for red apples. When we explained that we could buy two bags of apples we asked them to vote again about the second bag of apples. They chose to buy two bags of red apples. We took our two bags of apples to a very kind checkout employee who patiently counted out our bags of pennies. Each child was able to give her one bag of coins, and she counted out the money to make sure that we had given her the right amount. The children were also very patient as they watched her calculate. Then we were ready to take our bags of apples and walk back to our school!

This trip was a challenge to the children's attention spans, and the morahs were so impressed with their hard work. It is truly difficult to control your body, pay attention to rules, and focus on walking together for such a long time as a four-year-old. It was a huge workout for their frontal lobes and executive functioning skills. This is the part of their brains that are growing the most between the ages of four and five, so it's a great opportunity for them to experience these types of challenges. When we returned to our school, though, the morahs knew that the children needed to run around outside and move their bodies. After that we returned to our classroom and brought our apples to Rabbi Deitsch. We shared with him our new word: donation. He was very grateful to receive our apples and told us that he would put them out for families for Rosh Hashanah.

When we got back to our classroom, Morah Tara showed the children that we still have Tzedakah money. She asked the children if they would like to choose a new group to help with our Tzedakah money, since we continue to give Tzedakah each day. The children agreed that we should, so we will start our Tzedakah Project provocation again after the high holidays!

Later in the day, we reflected on our field trip during play story drawing. What the morahs discovered was that the children were most interested in the walk from our school to the grocery store. Almost all of them drew about the walk itself, as opposed to buying apples or their experience in Albertsons. After reflecting upon the children's reflections, we hope to begin taking the children for walks more often in the future.

Morah Tara and the No-Good-Very-Sticky Week

Rosh Hashanah brings many opportunities to explore with all of our senses! Morah Tara does not like exploring food through touch, but this week, we made it available for the children anyway! On Monday we used apples as paint brushes and honey as paint! This was so messy we did it outside of our classroom. The children made great observations about the honey: Lucy said that she was drizzling it. Imie said that it was sticky. Bayla said that she was covering her whole page in honey. Oree said that she liked using a smaller apple slice more than a big, big apple slice. Ariel S. said that she liked touching the honey. Leah started singing the apple song, and all of her friends joined her. Eliya chose to skip the project.

On Wednesday, we worked with pomegranate seeds. Lucy, Eliya, Ariel F., and Ariel S. took all the seeds out of the pomegranate and put them into a bucket. We were going to stain paper, but our pomegranate seeds were clear, so we squished them on paper instead. Oree joined her friends to squish the seeds, and they all began counting seeds as they squished together.

Shana Tova Cards

Everyone worked very hard on their Shana Tova cards for bubbies, zaydes, sabas, saftas, popsies, grandpas, grandmas, and gigis this week. Several friends completed cards last week and the week before. Morah Merele worked with the children to stuff their cards into envelopes, write addresses, and place stamps onto the envelopes. Our friends in the Green Room took a field trip to the mailbox to mail them for us!

More on Risk Assessment and Child-Led Learning

The children had two amazing types of work happening on Thursday morning of their own making. Eliya and Oree built an airplane with full food service and tickets to board while several other friends decided to use chairs to climb onto one of our shelves and jump off. (Did we mention it was a challenging week for Morah Tara??) The morahs watched them as they chose how much risk each child chose to take as they got to the top of the shelf. At first Ariel S. was afraid to stand up on the shelf and Imie was afraid to jump off. Imie sat back down and slid off the shelf. Eliya and Lucy went straight for a big jump, both landing on two feet. This game evolved over about thirty minutes and the children continued to change the rules about how to wait for their turn. A few conflicts came up, and the children were able to problem solve with each other to find a solution together. This kind of work is important, again, for the executive functioning skills in their brains: the ability to assess risk and control impulses. It is also very good for their bones: jumping from 2-4 feet off the ground allows their body weight to create an impact on their bones allowing them to grow denser. This type of exercise prevents bone density issues such as osteoporosis as they age.

When the children were finished with their jumping game, they returned to the airplane that Eliya and Oree had built. Oree chose to be the captain, and asked that Leah: her baby, sat next to her. Ariel F. told Oree that Leah could sit on Oree's other side, but then they saw that there were things on the floor next to Oree's other side. They pondered if they could move the items off the floor, but they decided that they were part of the plane, so Ariel F., Leah, and Oree sat in a row together to fly their airplane.

Observational Drawings

Please take a look at the beautiful observational drawings and paintings that your children made in the preschool hallway. They all chose different symbols of Rosh Hashanah to recreate on their paper.

L'Shana Tova!

Have a wonderful Rosh Hashanah! The Rainbow Class wishes you all a very sweet new year!

Our Tzedakah Project (so far!)

Documentation for the week of September 19-23, 2016

What Is Tzedakah?

We began our Tzedakah Project a few weeks ago at a morning meeting with this conversation:

Morah: What happens when we give Tzedakah?

Leah: It gets heavy.

Morah: It does get heavy, then sometimes we come back and it's empty again.

Bayla: Where does it go?

Morah: Who do we help with our Tzedakah?

Oree: Poor people.

Morah: Everyone needs help sometimes. How can we use Tzedakah to help?

Eliya: I don't know

Morah: What might people need?

Lucy: Food

Ariel S.: Drinks

Ariel F.: Food

Morah: Can we help anyone besides people?

Eliya: I want to give food to all the animals.

Imie: I want to help Hashem.

Morah: Where can we help Hashem? Who serves Hashem?

Imie: I do!

Morah: What about a place that serves Hashem? Where do we go on Shabbos?

Bayla: To Shul!

Morah: Which Shul can we help?

Oree: The big Shul!

Morah: Is there more than one Shul? Or is ours the only one?

Children: There's more than one.

Morah: Where are the other ones?

Bayla: In New York.

Lucy: They are our neighbors.

Morah: Which Shul do we want to help?

Oree: Our Shul.

Who Do We Help?

After our initial conversation, the morahs created a provocation for the children to vote on who we should help. We used their ideas to provide possibilities and gave them each a block with their name on it to cast their vote. Lucy took her voting block and put it by a picture of pets, then said, "I want to be a veterinarian so I want to help the pets." Imie said, "I want to help our Shul because it's the same as our school." These conversations continued throughout the first day of voting. The children spoke to each other and the morahs about why they were making their choices and who they hoped our class would choose to help. 

The polls closed at lunchtime, and we created a bar graph in the afternoon. This provided an opportunity to learn how we can use paper, markers, and symbols to represent real life experiences. It also promoted pre-math skills and number recognition as well as learning about how important a ruler can be! Bayla and Eliya helped Morah Tara count the votes and create the bar graph. Later, they shared it with their friends and explained to them about what it meant. It was amazing to see how quickly Bayla and Eliya became the experts. They specifically pointed out the zero line, showing that they understood that when there was no bar, there were no votes. This shows their recognition that when there can be something there can also be nothing: another important math skill.

On our second day of voting, we narrowed down our choices by putting out only the options that the children had voted for the day before. We discussed the concept of what it means to narrow down your choices, and how it can help in decision making. The children got a chance to vote again, and make another bar graph in the afternoon. The polls closed again at lunchtime, but Imie shared that she was very uncomfortable with her vote. After a while, Morah Tara realized that she was trying to say that she was hoping to change her vote, and allowed her to do so. Bayla saw that Imie had made a change, and told us that we needed to make another bar graph to represent the new results, so we sat down and made another one. Imie used the one that Bayla and Morah Tara made together to create her own. It was clear from the bar graph that the children had chosen to help our Shul with their Tzedakah money.

At morning meeting the next day, we asked the children about how we could use Tzedakah money to help our Shul. We came up with a list of items that the synagogue might need while we were in our classroom, then we walked around the building looking for items that we could possibly donate. The children found mezuzahs, pushkas, teffilin, and many other items. Once we had a list created, we took it to Rabbi Deitsch to ask for his expert advice. The children sat on the couch and discussed their discoveries with him. He helped us narrow down our choices to items that were reasonable to purchase with a penny a day from each child.

Once we gathered all the information we needed, we created another voting provocation. This time the children were deciding what we should donate to our Shul. As they continued their work with our Tzedakah Project, they began to learn the concept of a donation: we use money to buy items or services that can help our community. This is different than helping through actions such as volunteering. It is easy for children to see how they help each other through action every day in our classroom and at home. Focusing on how money can also help, has been a focus of our learning. The children cast their votes again. This time they all gathered together around the voting table and counted the votes as they were cast. They excitedly added to their count as most of their friends chose to donate money to buy apples for Rosh Hashanah. Since this vote was so important to our next step, we left the polls open for two days. The children came and changed their vote a few times, but the results did not change in the end.

How Do We Help?

When we decided to donate apples for Rosh Hashanah, we created a new provocation for the children to explore what money is, how it works, and how we can know if we have enough money to purchase apples at the store. Money is a very advanced concept for four-year-olds, but we chose to offer an opportunity for learning and see where the children went with it. The first thing the children did was a one-to-one correlation activity placing one coin in each picture of a penny that they saw. As they continued their work, they noticed that not all the coins look the same. We helped them to notice the small differences in the coins so that they could match the pennies to the pennies, the nickels to the nickels, etc. 

We then started asking the children if we had enough money to buy our apples. This puzzled them, and they considered it for a while. They decided that if we fill up the page, we should have enough. Unfortunately, this is not how we set up the provocation. We set it up in hopes that they would see how many of each type of coin would equal a dollar. They began questioning us about the equal symbol. We shared that it meant, "the same as." Once they began understanding this concept, we transformed our provocation to reflect how much each coin was worth in relation to a penny. This flipped our math exploration from understanding what 100 means to what 1 means. Imie began to explore this concept and after a few minutes she realized that we wouldn't have enough of our own Tzedakah money to buy apples!

Taking Action

Morah Tara asked Imie what we should do, and she said, "Get more money!" Morah Tara asked how we should do that, and she responded, "We can ask Vella's class!" So Morah Tara took Imie to the Green Room where they happened to be davening! She asked them if they would be interested in donating their Tzedakah money to our project, and they agreed that it would be a good idea. She then took their Tzedakah, told her friends in the Rainbow Class about it, and added it to our Tzedakah provocation. 

Next week we will gather our coins and take them with us on our first field trip to Albertsons Grocery Store where we will be given a tour of the produce department. After that we will give our apples to our Shul where they will be offered to the community on Rosh Hashanah! When we have completed the entire process, we will begin voting again about who we should help with our Tzedakah money next.

Teacher Reflection

It became clear that the morahs set our money provocation up a bit backwards, but that was okay! We were able to assess where the children's learning was, and adjust our provocation as we went along so that it was meaningful to them. After giving the children a chance to learn about money in a more advanced way, Morah Tara scaled the provocation back to a sorting opportunity. She placed four bowls in front of the plate of mixed Tzedakah coins so that the children could begin recognizing the differences in the coins. They will have a chance to sort money in this way, and then we will move on to setting up a one-to-one correlation opportunity next week so that they can see whether or not we have the amount of money we need to buy apples by filling up the chart that we provide for them.