Welcome back to Kindergarten!

Dear Kindergarten Families,

We hope you had a wonderful and relaxing break! We wish you a happy and healthy New Year 2018! The children were excited to be back and had a wonderful short week in kindergarten!

In Math, we started a new, 3rd, workbook. We are learning about various geometric shapes: flat and 3D (or solid). The children reviewed familiar shapes such as squares, triangles, rectangles, circles, ovals and hexagons. Then we introduced solid shapes through visual exploration, a scavenger hunt around the room and various books. These new shapes are a cone, pyramid, cube, cylinder, sphere, and rectangular prism. Please help your children practice these shapes at home by playing “I Spy a …. (cone, cylinder, etc.).”

We have been also reviewing numbers 0-20 and will begin learning numbers 0-100 next week and counting by 2s, 5s and 10s.

In English Language Arts, we learned the letter Oo and the short sound /o/ it makes (as in ‘octopus’). We practiced forming upper and lowercase letters Oo using our Handwriting Without Tears books, wooden planks, and finding words that start with O and drawing pictures of them.

On the first day of school in 2018, each child wrote in their journal “On My Winter Break…..” telling about their favorite activities and illustrating their writing.

In Social Studies, we began learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We read the book “Martin’s Big Words” by Doreen Rappaport. We discussed words that help show kindness and love to others. Both groups were very passionate and involved in the discussion about “Martin’s Big Words.” The children brainstormed a long list of words of love, kindness and respect and will present these words to you and the whole school during our Martin Luther King Tekes on Friday, January 12th, at 9am.

In Hebrew this week we started learning about clothes. The children practiced describing what they are wearing using the verb lovesh/ loveshet (wearing). We also learned about the following clothing items: Chultza-shirt , michnasayim-pants, kovah- hat , simlah- dress, meil- coat, chatzait- skirt, Kfafot- gloves, magafayim- boots. We played games such as matching games, aleph beit blocks, magnets, and Bingo and introduced the kids to new books such as “Hayom Halavan” and “Hayom Hakachol” by Shulamit Tzarfati .

In Judaics, we learned about the fifth day of creation on which G-d created the fish (Dagim), sea animals and birds (tziporim). We drew and colored on the board beautiful pictures of the different sea animals such as (no need to memorize it): shark- karish, whale- livyatan, Sea horse- soos yam, sea turtle – tzav yam, starfish- kochav yam, dolfin- dolfin.

We have two events in January about which our students are very excited and might bring them up in conversations with you. First event is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tekes/Assembly on January 12 at 9am in the Gym. Our kindergartners will be presenting at the assembly and they are also excited that it will be led by their 4th grade buddies. Another exciting event is our 8th grade Musical “Beauty and the Beast” on January 25 and 26 at 6pm. The children will be talking about it because we will begin our “Fairy Tales” Unit in Reading and Writing and one of the fairy tales will be “Beauty and the Beast.” In addition, the children will see their older friends rehearsing the play during next 3 weeks. Get tickets soon, it should be great!

Shabbat Shalom!

Rachel, Regina, Irit, and Ilana

Baking cookies for Hanukkah (back in December!)