Term 2: Week 8: World Cup

This week has flown by but has been very busy within the classroom.

We started off the week by celebrating Simonne's 6th birthday. We had a lovely birthday ring on Monday morning which included her mom Shelley showing us a beautiful photo timeline of Simonne's life from birth to the present day. We also got delicious cup cakes and 3 pot plants for the classroom. Thanks very much to Shelley, Jack and Simonne.

We continued our theme of World Cup and our count down to the start next week. We made flags - painting, colouring and gluing to make the different countries flags. We also made football pitches on green card board and focused on the shapes - rectangles and circles on the pitch and hexagons on the sphere football. The children have especially enjoyed playing the finger football game this week and scoring many goals to the cheers of their friends.

Our letter of the week was 'p' for puppy. We glued a picture of a puppy with floppy ears and paw prints to decorate. Other words the children came up with were poppy, pizza, pasta, pop, pineapple, porcupine, pink and princess to name but a few.

We will do baking next week to make gingerbread footballers and have a football dress up day on Wednesday as it is the last day of the term. We might even get to kick a ball around in a Class Bet football match! Looking forward to it.

Much love,
Morah Lana

Term 2:Week 7: World Cup

During class this week we have been learning a bit about the history of soccer and the build up to The World Cup. We have been looking at the different countries in the competition and their flags.

The children copied flags to colour in and the older ones also wrote their own country names. We did a maths worksheet where we had to count footballs, boots, goals and players. They even had a go at drawing their own footballers.

Our letter of the week was 'g' for girl and we all made a pretty girls with long ponytails. Onthe practical life shelf we have a bow frame where the children can practice to tie bows. They got to put this into practice when typing bows around their wool hair. The older girls also loves making their own woollen plaits.

For life skills we made some football player puppets with pegs for legs. They are all lined up in the Class Bet World Cup team. The children looked through the library books for inspiration for their choice of colour for the shirts.

So football fever is high in class bet and we continue more of this next week.
Have a fabulous weekend.
Much Love
Morah Lana

Term 2: Week 6: Shavuot & Healthy eating habits

Well another short but busy week. This week saw the preparation for Shavuot and the children decorated their boxes for the fruit donations. As we had been learning about our bodies and senses, we decided to decorate the boxes with finger print flowers. The children also coloured in flowers and drew pictures of flowers which they then glued onto their boxes.

Thanks to the parents for their generous donations of the fruits. This gave us the opportunity to link this in with our Healthy Eating habits theme. We talked about the different fruits and the children were very quick to tell us their favourites (and not so favourites).

We celebrated Layla and Kaylee's birthdays this week. Layla turned 5 and Kaylee turned 4. Thanks to their parents for joining us for their birthday rings and for the lovely donations of cultural puzzles from Kaylee.

We wisk Kiera well and look forward to seeing her back at school on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend.
Much love,
Morah Lana

Term 2: Week 5: The Senses

This week we have been finding out all about the world around us through our senses. We have smelled and tasted and felt and listened and seen so many different things.

The fun began with us tasting different foods - sweet sugar, bitter coffee, sour lemon and salty choips. There were some really funny faces pulled when we tasted the lemon. But big smiles when we tasted the sugar and the salty chip. The bitter coffee caused a bit of confusion for some... although we litererally tasted a drop of coffee on our finger, some children were very reluctant. One even said "No I cannot taste it. Coffee is not for children".

We enjoyed listening to mystery sounds - bells, a stapler, paper rustling and a cell phone ringing. We also of course worked with all our lovely Montessori Sensorial materials such as the fabrics and tactile tablets, the sound boxes and the colour boxes. All of these involve matching two of the same sounds, texture or coloured but isolates each sense per activity.

Our letter of the week was 'n' and although the obvious choice was "n for nose" we actually chose to do "net". This ties in with our football theme and the children made their own goal net with netting and sucker sticks for the posts.

During ring time we have been talking about our 10 Sinai classroom agreements. This ties in with our information groups with Morah Sarah on the Ten Commandments. We made our own version of the Torah with our own agreements on it. The main theme of the agreements is respect... Respecting Hashem, respecting our world, respecting our parents and Morahs and respecting our friends.

So we have had a busy but fun-filled week and wish you a restful and enjoyable weekend.
Much love,
Morah Lana

Term 2: Week 4: The Lungs

Phew... we have been out of breath this week with all the activities we have been focusing on to learn about our lungs and how they work. We have been blowing bubbles, blowing through straws to move different objects and then measuring the distance they travel and also making bubble art. We blew up balloons to make them different sizes - more air means bigger balloons. Thanks to good weather today, we even got outside to blow bubbles in the garden.

In Xhosa we learned that we have two 'amaphaphu' (lungs).

Our letter of the week was 'o' - for oxygen of course!! The children made an ostrich by sticking on a body and then using a straw and white paint to paint on the feathers.

Next week we are focusing on our senses with lots of things to taste, feel, see, hear and smell, alongside Shavuot, which ties in beautifully with flowers and using our senses.
Please feel free to post your comments or feedback, we love hearing from you all!
Have a wonderful weekend,
Much Love
Morah Lana

Term 2: Week 3: The Muscles

What a week! We managed to fit 5 days worth of activities into 2 days!!
We have been learning all about our muscles this week - how they contract and relax to make every single movement of our bodies possible... walking, running, smiling, blinking, painting and drawing to name but a few. We had a lot of 'body building' type poses in the class with children showing off their muscles.

Following on with Our Body theme, our life skill this week was sewing. We used needles and wool to sew around face shapes and give them some really interesting hair styles.

The children (and Morahs) are all very exctied about the trip to the Green Point Football stadium on Friday. We continue with our countdown in class, taking turns to put up the next football on our chart each day. As we get closer to the day we will be focusing more on the teams and flags and countries taking part.

Looking forward to reporting back on our trip and to another wonderfully busy week next week.

lots of love from
Morah Lana

Term 2 Week 2 The Heart

Wow ... another busy and exciting week for Class Bet downstairs.

We started off our week by celebrating Israel Day on Monday.

Our theme of The Body was expanded on this week as we learned about the vital organ which beats about 10 000 times a day in each of us... Our Heart. The children listened to their own heart beat and felt their pulses and we looked at many books and posters of pictures of our insides and learned about the facts and functions of the heart in our groups.

We traced around a child from our class to create a life-sized body poster. Each week we will be adding organs and parts of the body to it, with labels, to create a 3D poster within the classroom. We are also learning the names of the body parts and organs in Xhosa with Caleb to add to our poster.

To tie our theme into the whole curriculum we played games of counting heart shaped beads, did a maths worksheet of heart shapes in sum form and of course baked delicious heart shaped biscuits. The children loved the measuring, mixed, stiring, kneading, rolling and cutting but their favourite part was of course the eating!
The children also made colourful and tactile (rough and smooth) heart shapes collage.

On Wednesday we celebrated Morah Candice's birthday. The children made her cards and wrote her messages for her special day.

Our letter of the week was 'i' and as ever the children came up with lots of ideas of words beginning with 'i' - insect, ikky, india, Israel, Ingrid to name but a few. We made a picture of an igloo using little ice bricks (styrofoam) which the children had to use to build their igloo.

The World Cup is but 48 days away now and we started our countdown in the classroom using a poster and football counters. Each day we cover up a number and the countdown continues.

We send Daniel, Adin and Noah love and a speedy recovery, as well as Morah Candice who was off sick today.

Looking forward to another busy week next week - even though it will only be a short week. Have a fun-filled long weekend.
Until next week, much love
Morah Lana