Everything Sukkot !

We added some vegetable counters to the playdough center, and before we knew it the girls had worked together to create a most unusual sukkah.

Craft sticks added another dimension to the play.



We read the book Tamar's Sukkah which is all about the many things you need to make your sukkah complete.  Noor and Daniel are carefully tracing and cutting fruit to hang in the sukkah. 



Suri chose to make grapes.  Small grapes from the dramatic play area helped her to understand that she needed to show the individual grapes in  one bunch.

More tracing and cutting.  The children practice holding crayons and scissors correctly,  positioning their hand to stabilize the pattern while tracing, and developing finger and hand flexibility.  These skills will eventually enable children to write and draw easily; that's why you will always see these activities going on in our room!

Amelia adds the first piece of fruit to the sukkah.

Emma made a pumpkin.  Can you suspend a large pumpkin from the roof of the sukkah? "  No way!" said Emma.  Good problem solving!

A  happy helper!

As we learned in the book, a sukkah is not complete without friends.  We asked the children how we could show that there would be people in the sukkah.  They had many creative responses from drawing (as you can see Jake's person above) to creating people from  paper and pipe cleaners, to cutting pictures from magazines.

The class decided that it would be nice to have everyone draw themselves,  and here's Patrick.

Briana is checking out the sukkah to see which friends still need to draw themselves.

Alex is counting...do we have 13?

Next, the children came up and counted how many of each fruit we had in the sukkah.  As we wrote those numbers down, there was a lot of conversation about which fruits had more or less or the same.  Suddenly, Zoey said, "That's a pattern!"  And sure enough the top row read 3, 4, 3, 4.  Great observation!

Our sukkah learning wasn't over.  In Gan, Heidi taught us about the first sukkah, so many years ago.  The children are dressed for the dessert and their jobs as either sheep herders or chicken coop cleaners.  After a hard day of work they were invited into the sukkah for refreshment....

...and rest.

Celebrating Sukkot at Shabbat with our own luluvs and etrogs.