Thank you for entrusting your children in our care. We will truly miss them all.
And so we began telling the Passover story from our Haggadah book, along with many puppets and props to add in the fun. We were encouraged to feel empathy for the slaves who were so sad with all their hard work, and we shared in their joy as Hashem sends Moses to help set them free.
Please use the Passover story book inserted in your child’s expandable haggadah as a means for them to share the story and songs with you.
The children had the opportunity to make their own matzah from scratch at our model matzah bakery. Grinding the wheat for flour, squishing and rolling out the dough was quite a hands on experience of what it takes to make this simple food.
The children were also given the opportunity to make a matzah (or afikomen) bag of their own.
After putting pieces of colorful tissue paper on a piece of material, we sprayed water on top until everything was all wet. “Blue go on there!” was heard as the color bled onto the material. We then looked at the sample matzah bag on the seder table and pointed out that there were letters on it. Morah told the children that it says the word “MATZAH”. Although we don’t know our letters yet or know how to read, telling this to the children raises their awareness of letters and words in the world around them.
To help us focus on specific mathematical, cognitive skills that are age appropriate we chose to mesh the holiday symbols into fun number and language games.We used matzah picture cards numbered 1-5 to practice counting. Here we are learning to count one to one correspondence as we slowly count using our finger as our pointer to number one object at a time. 
We used picture cards to play a language game focusing on vocabulary words as big and small or big/medium/small with Passover images. Sometimes we group all the large pictures together, or all the small pictures together and other times we place all the similar object pictures in ascending order.
Now that we are familiar with the items of the Seder meal, the children each worked on manipulating their little fingers to glue the objects onto a picture of the Seder in their expandable Haggadah. How exciting it will be to see us add details, cutlery people and the like to this very page as we learn more about the holiday in coming years.
Have a Happy Passover, Morah Chaya Greenwald and Morah Anna Suazo
Each Friday we have a Shabbat celebration with the children in our class, though this time it would be different. We were going to be having a Shabbat Dinner together with our families and friends. To help the children process this information we worked on preparing an "invitation" in which the children glued on the shabbat dinner items, and spoke with Morah about who might be sitting in each of the chairs.
Throughout our Shabbat unit, we have been highlighting the concept of preparation. A new song we learnt (to the tune of Here we go round the mullberry bush) was
his is the way we take a bath to get ready for Shabbat.
There were different Shabbat games for us to play with in our classroom. These helped us to practice new vocabulary words, become familiar with Shabbat objects, practice classifying big and small as well as spatial orientation. 
The children were very excited to creat their own shabbat candlestick. The gems we used to decorate the candlestick were shiny, colorful and from a variety of shapes. Some children were looking for a specific color or shape to use, searching through the variety and choosing the ones which they wanted. 
The children worked on enhancing their fine motor skills by pushing the gems far into the clay and spreading glitter glue all around for decoration. 
Each class had the opportunity to prepare a dish for the dinner. Our class prepared corn salad, by carefully cutting the peppers (with Morah's help) and mixing it together with the corn and spices. They were quite intrigued to see the many little seeds inside that red pepper! Thank you Morah Anna for helping us in the process.
It's Winter. What a great opportunity for the children to fully experience the world around them during this season. Through our experiences we continue to build our vocabulary and knowledge of the world around us.
Earlier last week, the children were delighted to find a surprise awaiting them at the water table - lots and lots of ice! As the children used their senses to experience the "ice table" they told each other "There's ice in there." "Cold." Later on in the day, the children were wondering, "Where ice go?" Morah: "There's no more ice in there. The ice melted. Can you say "melted"? "Melted. Ice melted."
At circle time Morah asked the children if there was anything we could put on our hands to keep them warm from the cold. The responses: "Gloves."
Each time we get ready to go outside, we re-talk about what we need to wear to keep each of our body parts warm. What a great way for us to begin to internalize the importance of the need to assess 
and prepare. Then all bundled in their warm winter gear, the young toddlers enjoy playing with the fresh snow and going sledding. 
They are definitely building their muscles as they are determined to make it to the top of the hill for another ride on the sled. Sometimes we ride together with an older child, fostering the community spirit.
The children then had the opportunity to be part of the learning process as they went upstairs to the computer room, saw "Aidan hat" "Boots" "My mittens" and more on the screen. Morah then asked the class if they would like to have their pictures "on a paper" (in other words, printed out). The class seemed intigued about that and went to pick up their pictures from the printer. When they saw the paper coming out of the machine, their faces were gleeful. They are thrilled about these pictures. Imagine, MY jacket on this paper. MY hat. MY boots. We will now continue to use these personal cards to play our match-it game in which we will hone math skills of counting and one to one correspondence as well as literacy skills of vocabulary. And, since the children were a part of the process, they will certainly feel a connection to the game!
More News from Our Class:
At Zimmer, every unit is taught with specific values and mindsets which we wish to impart to the children. At the toddlers level, we wanted the children to walk away from Chanuka with the feeling of "Holidays are special and happy days" as well as having the knowledge that there are specific practices for the holiday: lighting the menorah, playing dreidel and eating latkes and doughnuts. As the years go on, we add on the historical story of the Maccabees as well as add on to the meaning and messages of the holiday.
The children were quite intrigued with the dreidel, watching it spin round and round.
We added on a dreidel game of our own - giving each child a chance to spin our big stuffed dreidel. Once the dreidel stopped spinning we would take note of what color it had landed on, and gave the child a token of the same color. What a fun way to practice our colors!
The children also had the opportunity to create their own dreidel image painting. But how do we know if the child understands what it is they are making? We can only find out if we take the time to ask. So before we started, Morah showed the children the dreidel cutout and asked the children what it was. Once we affirmed they were connecting the one dimentional cutout to the 3D object, we showed the children how we were taping the stencil over another paper. Smocks on and paintbrushes out to paint it all around and... it was sure exciting to see the stencil come off and find the dreidel underneath.
We had a wonderful time working with our daddies and their hammers to indent decorative pieces for our school menorah. 
And what would Chanukah be without making some yummy doughnuts!
See you tomorrow,
