Our Paper Mache Explosion!

Hello family and friends!

We have had such a busy week in the Aalva class! You may not believe that statement after I tell you that we only worked on one project, but I assure you, we've been some busy little bees! Coming into the week I was confident that we would wrap up our ocean discovery and we would be well into our study of Passover. Haha! I was so very wrong! However, we are at the tail end of our ocean exploration and will dive quickly into Passover next week.

The project that has taken up our whole entire week is the making of paper mache sea creatures. Honestly, they look so awesome that we don't even care that it's taken us over a week to complete them! If you've done paper mache before you may laugh at the fact that we actually thought this would be a fairly quick project to complete with 4 and 5 year olds! As messy as it may be, we've been having a blast! As you may remember from our previous blog post, each child has been researching their favorite sea creature. This week we decided to make our own. We started by finding bases (that were similar to our creature's body shape) to paper mache around. We used things such soda bottles, cardboard, and bunched up newspaper. After we figured out our bases, we made a glue/water paste (aka: a sticky mess) and cut up stripes of newspaper. Next, we dipped the newspaper in the paste and covered our bases completely. As we covered them we also added characteristics that would make the base look more like our creature, such as fins or spikes. Michelle and I each went through this process one-on-one with the kids. As we made them we looked at books and recalled facts about our sea creatures. This first stage took us about 2 days to complete.

After we formed and glued our bases, we spent 2 days painting our paper mache creatures. Some kids chose to look at pictures in order to match colors, while others chose to paint theirs any color they wanted. Once our creatures dry completely, we will begin adding our details to them. This will start Monday. The kids will be adding eyes, teeth, tentacles, anything that is characteristic to their favorite sea creature. I can't wait to see how these will turn out! We will be hanging them from the ceiling in our classroom as soon as they are completed so be on the lookout! The kids have loved the process and are eager to finish them. After we complete these we will focus on Passover. We've been able to read some stories and start a few Passover activities this week but we're excited to have this as our main focus and learn more about the holiday! I also wanted to share that we practiced Sedar with Morah Devorah and the 3 year olds earlier this week. We all met together in the Smartboard room and the tables were set with plates and grape juice. This was awesome! Morah Devorah took us step by step through the Sedar meal (what we ate, why we ate it, why it's important). We have some pictures below of our time eating together!

I also wanted to take this time to thank Reshma (Vedh's mom) for coming into our classroom to photograph our day. She was able to come in earlier this week and spend some time with us during centers/making our creatures. She did this with the intention of capturing some of Vedh's 4 year old experiences, but was kind enough to photograph the rest of us as well. The pictures I've seen so far are amazing! Thank you, Resh for capturing such sweet moments in the 4's!!

Approaches to Learning:

Demonstrate increasing ability to identify and take appropriate risks in order to learn and demonstrate new skills.
Show curiosity in an increasing variety of activities, tasks, and learning centers.
Demonstrate eagerness and interest as a learner by questions and adding ideas.
Demonstrate delight or satisfaction when completing a task, solving a problem, or making a discovery.
Demonstrate growing initiative in selecting and carrying out activities.

Social & Emotional:

Demonstrate self direction by making choices among peers, activities and materials.
Demonstrate confidence by participating in most classroom activities.
Respond respectfully to positive and negative feedback from adults most of the time.
Follow classroom rules and procedures with reminders.
Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.

Language & Literacy:

Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
Begin to identify significant words from text real aloud.
Begin to ask questions about eh causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
Explore books independently.
Show interest in informational texts about familiar objects.
Incorporate information from informational texts into play activities.
Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.

Mathematics: