Tu B’Shvat

This week we focused our attention on Tu B’Shvat, the birthday of the trees! We showed the children a globe and where New York was on the globe. We then explained to the children even though it is winter in New York and the trees do not have any leaves, on the other side of the world the sun is starting to warm up and it is becoming spring.

In honor of Tu B’shvat we decided to conduct a fun science experiment. We decided to see if we would be able to grow our own plants. However, in our science experiment we are not going to grow our seeds in soil; we are going to just use lima beans, water, a paper towel and the sun. For this science experiment we will need a lot of patience. As pairs the children sprayed water onto a paper towel and then placed their beans onto the damp paper towels. The children then placed their damp paper towels in a ziplock bag and hung the bags near the window to soak up some of the warm sun. For the next few weeks we will record what we observe.   

To celebrate the birthday of the trees we ate some dried fruits, such as, raisins, apricots, figs and dates. Since most of us have never tasted most of these fruits before we decided to graph which dried fruit we liked the most. After tasting each fruit the children placed a tally mark on our graph, under their favorite dried fruit. The children were able to recognize the name of the fruits just by looking at the beginning letter and sounding it out. We are so proud of our little readers!

As a fun math activity we played a matching game with leaves and numbers. Each child got a leaf with a number written on it and had to match it to the number on the braches. Since we have twelve children in the class we counted to the number twelve. This activity helped teach the children number recognition and one to one correspondence.

We additionally made our very own fruit salad. 

Painting Class

This week we learned about Keith Haring and how he began his art career right here in NYC. We then made our own artwork creating Keith Haring's famous outlines.