Holiday Visits

Sharing Traditions with Families...

We had a great morning full of family visitors! Hannah's Mom and Dad came in to share a story and talk to our class about the holiday they celebrate this time of year, Hanukkah. Hannah's Mom, Julia, joined our circle while Hannah's Dad, Michael, told us about this holiday and why people of the Jewish faith celebrate this special time. We talked about the historical context of the holiday and how some celebrators of Hanukkah spend this special time with their loved ones. There are games to be played, like the dreidel game, as well as the sharing of certain foods with one another, including a potato dish called latkes. The story we got to hear today was called The GoLem's Latke's and told the story of a Frankenstein-like creature made of mud and magic by a rabbi many, many years ago who helps out around a household preparing for Hanukkah and ends up creating an overload of the delicious holiday dish.

Julia and Michael left us with some new knowledge, Hanukkah cookies, and a few of their dreidels to try our hands at today.

Later in our morning, after some time running around outside, Malaika, Samuel's mom, came in to share what their family celebrates. She came in with Samuel's little brother, Solomon, and one of their family's favorite Christmas story, The Night Before Christmas. With Samuel's help, she read this fun story which goes through some of the fun traditions surrounding waiting for St. Nick, Santa, to come with his presents to your household. The story had many beautiful pictures and the exciting anticipation of the story kept everyone enthralled.

After the story, we shared a few Christmas carols that our Cardinal teachers and Malaika knew and had a special treat of Christmas cookies that Samuel and his mother baked! What a wonderful morning full of sharing family traditions and delicious treats too!

Peace In Our Day...

Paula was interested in sharing  the customs and traditions that her family experiences each year as they celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Preparing a beautiful meal for family and friends is always a favorite part of the holiday! Paula wanted to show the children some of the items that grace her dinner table each year during the holiday season.











She placed a large table cloth on our Meeting area rug and created together we created our own beautiful holiday table!







  Using special flower napkins, candles, flowers and gourds we transformed our classroom into a festive gathering spot.  Paula talked about  how special it was to share the New Year with her family each year, and how special it was to now share it with her new Cardinal family.

Paula lit the Sabbath candles and sang the special prayer that her mom would sing when lighting the candles to begin the holiday.  We listened as she shared the experiences she had with her own family and her boys when they were children growing up.  We looked at kiddish cups that belonged to her sons and we ate raisin challah and dipped apples in honey.  We learned that dipping the apples in honey symbolizes the wish for everyone to have a sweet and happy New Year.  We read Sound The Shofar! A Story for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur by, Leslie Kimmelman which was a perfect book to read aloud for children of this age.  

Our I Was Wondering... question bulletin board is filling up with many, many thoughts. We were inspired to create a Question Board for many reasons.  Initially, we felt that this process was a way to acknowledge the children's thoughts. We believe that creating an environment which is rich in language and words supports and respects each child's ideas and is a meaningful way to begin to build a sense of community within our classroom.  This is the beginning of children learning to ask questions and engage in research.  The very first questions that were posted this year were about the sounds that cardinals make.  Today we revisited these questions and talked about ways that we may learn more about what we were curious of.  The teachers suggested using the Internet to see if we could Google bird sounds and fine the cardinal sounds. We engaged in an amazing listening activity where we listened to not only the sounds of Cardinals, but also of the bird sounds of all of our other Early Childhood friends!  We listened to Catbirds, Owls and Doves!  For a first day of bird listening, the children did great!  We will pursue this activity and see if the children  can discriminate different bird  sounds  and we will play some interesting listening games.  Below is the website we used to listen to Cardinal sounds. 

 Enjoy listening with your child and let us know how it goes!

http://www.birdjam.com/birdsong.php?id=3