We have had such a fun week celebrating Purim. We spent the week learning the story of brave Ester who saved the Jewish people from Haman. We read a different book each day that told the story. We spent time talking about the characters and discussing the importance of this holiday. We also turned our housekeeping center into King Ahasuerus and Queen Ester's castle. We added some crowns and costumes to the center along with cardboard boxes to make our castle entrance. We also made masks to wear as a disguise while playing in the castle. The kids dressing in disguise is a Purim custom. It demonstrates the fact that the miracle of Purim was disguised in more natural methods as opposed to an obvious miracle (this is also why the kids wore costumes on Thursday). It was a great week of imaginative play!
We wanted to spend some time this week focusing on the four mitzvah of Purim. The first of these is Mishloach Manot. This is the giving of food to others. To demonstrate this we weaved our own baskets using yarn and paper bowls. After weaving them, we filled them with clementine and homemade hamantaschen that the kids made. After putting food in their baskets, they gave them to a friend in the classroom. As we made these exchanges, we talked about the importance of giving to others and being thankful for what we were given. We also gave extra Tzedakah this week as well as listened to the reading of the Megillah (both mitzvah). The kids made groggers (noise makers) that they shook when the name of Haman was read aloud. We really enjoyed this as the Megillah was read in Hebrew - what an awesome experience! Another mitzvah for Purim is having a festive meal together. While we didn't have an actual meal (other than our fun lunches), we did pull a table into our castle. We discussed the meal and then let the kids have their own meal together. They set out plates, cooked the food in their kitchen, and dined together in the castle.
Throughout the week, the castle became a popular topic of interest. It drew more kids into housekeeping than we've had all year! We thought it would be fun to make our own smaller castles. Each child drew a picture of their own castle complete with plenty of details. They had a lot to say about their castles so we tried to record as much information about them as we could on their drawings. These are hanging up in the hallway so definitely take a peek at them! After drawing our castles, we took them to the blocks center and used the wooden blocks to make a 3D version of our castles. We encouraged the kids to take their artwork with them and use them as a guide as their constructed their castles. As we built both our wooden and cardboard castles, we talked about the fact that many of them are made of stone. We discussed the different aspects of a castle such as motes and walls for protection. We looked at several of our classroom pictures of Jerusalem to learn that it is still a walled city today!
Of course the most exciting part of the week was Thursday (Purim). We loved all the costumes!! They seemed to have a great time showing them off to us and their peers. We spent the morning in the synagogue listening to the Megillah reading and then got to play at the carnival. I was so impressed with the carnival! The older children in the school built games for us to play. Each game had an older student there to show the kids how to play and give out tickets. We let the kids wonder around the room playing all the games that they wanted and when they were done they turned their tickets in for an awesome prize. The kids did a fantastic job with this! It was a great experience for them and we are sending out a HUGE thank you to everyone who put it together! I feel that we all learned a lot this week - not just about Purim, but also about the Jewish culture! We took a lot of pictures this week, so I hope you enjoy them!
Approaches to Learning:
- Reason about events, relationships, or problems.
- Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
- Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
- Try to solve problems encountered in play.
- Manage transitions positively when told what to expect.
- Recognize effect on others of own behavior most of the time.
- Demonstrate with adult guidance simple techniques to solve social problems.
- Recognize own feelings and describe them some of the time.
- Make relevant comments or appropriate responses to story events or characters.
- Distinguish between descriptions of story events and spoken words of characters.
- Retell one or tow events from a story read aloud.
- Begin to identify significant words from text read aloud.
- Recall some details in stories read aloud.
- Incorporate favorite parts of literary texts into play activities.
- Begin to ask questions about the causes of events they observe or hear about in books.
- Investigate solutions to simple problems.
- Locate patterns in the environment.
- Use appropriate vocabulary to communicate mathematical ideas.
- Integrate mathematical ideas into personal representations.
- Represent simple two-dimensional geometric shapes.
- Associate time concepts with a clock.
Weaving baskets to give to our friends...
Sketching and building our castles...
Imaginative play at it's finest...
Listening to the Megillah reading...
Fun at the carnival...
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