Preparing for Special Days

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
"This is the way we clean up our toys, clean up toys, clean up our toys. This is the way we clean up our toys to get ready for Shabbat.
This is the way we take a bath, take a bath, take a bath. This is the way we take a bath to get ready for Shabbat.
This is the way we put on our clothes, make the challah dough, set the table...
This is the way we light the candles, drink kiddush, eat the challah... Shabbat is here"

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.