The Classroom Life : Yom Kippur & Sukkot

With the upcoming holiday of Yom Kippur we decided it would be appropriate to focus our attention to the topic of friendship. This week our class discussed what it means to be a friend and what friends can do with each other. The children gave us answers, such as, “Sharing toys with our friends”, “going outside to play”, and “reading books with each other”. We learned that being a friend means having to sometimes share and work together. In a large group we read the children the book Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni we then paired the children up in groups of twos and had them create a collage with using blue and yellow materials. This allowed the children to interact with friends they may have not gotten the chance to interact with yet.

To continue our theme of friendship the children also got a chance to create friendship bracelets using beads. Each child got to choose two different colors and create a pattern for the bracelet. The children worked hard on their bracelets to make sure that their friends receiving them would enjoy them.

This week we have also started learning about the exciting new holiday coming up – Sukkot! We spent time this week decorating our class sukkah with colorful fruits and vegetables. and paper chains. It is so beautiful!

For math we focused on shapes. We talked about all the different shapes we can find in a sukkah and then we made our very own, using various shapes. We used a square as our sukkah, a circle as a table, rectangles for bamboo, ovals for leaves, and triangles for chairs. We made our sukkahs in a large group, following step by step directions. Everyone did such a great job! We had even more shape fun by playing musical shapes. As we played music the children danced, when the music stopped we called out a shape and the children had to find that shape on the rug. We had a lot of fun!