Chanukah fun, part 2

Have you looked at the bulletin board outside our room?  It was inspired by the tradition of placing chanukiot in the window of your house......Charlotte traced and cut her window and drew a chanukiah.

Jake is drawing his chanukiah.  This takes both number and spatial awareness since the children have to make sure there is enough room for all eight candles plus the shamash.

Using a variety of materials and cool paper from the collage box, the children created a house.

Add some detail to your  picture....trees, clouds, flowers, sidewalk...it is all part of a child's growing awareness of their world.

Everyone had their own design ideas. 

And the  pictures are  fabulous!  We have received so many compliments from other teachers and parents and also from the many visitors to our school last week.  If you haven't seen them, be sure and take a look.

When we added candles to the play dough center, it wasn't long before the kids had created all types of chanukiot.

They quickly learned just how much pressure to use to push the candles in...too much and the candle breaks in two pieces!

A new puzzle...thanks to Zoey's dad for showing us how to put it together!



Now the kids really have the idea.



Who says you must put candles in the chanukiah.  The girls think beads look just as nice.  Either way, it's great for fine motor since those tiny beads are very hard to control.

Another   fine motor workout......spinning dreidels.



We are playing "Pass the Present".  Everyone has a clothespin.  The trick is to grab hold of one side of the picture of the present while the other child releases the card.  Much much trickier than the class thought it would be!  Just figuring out how to open the clothespin was an accomplishment for some of the children!



You can see their concentration!

What are we making in culinary arts?

Must be latkes! Apple latkes. The children chopped the apples ,mixed the dry ingredients, and added honey.   Cheryl gave everyone a small bowl of the ingredients and the children rolled and then made the latkes flat, flat, flat.Cheryl cooked all the latkes in oil, and we had a yummy snack!

We talk a lot about the miracle of Chanukah and the oil, but most of the children really don't understand why oil was so important.  We used an oil lamp to show the class how the fire (light) for the Eternal Light can come from oil.

Everyone decided it was better to live when  electricity had been discovered......it took us a long time to get the lamp to light!

In Gan, Heidi was on that same topic.

Where did the oil actually come from?

The children squeezed olives and tasted the oil oil they produced.

We hope everyone is having a happy and delicious Chanukah!