YEAR 1
This week in Year 1, with a little help from our good friend Ivri, we have been interested to learn all about the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah. The children enjoyed learning the Hanukkah story about the miracle of the oil and the lamp that is symbolized in the lighting of the menorah. The class was truly thrilled when Ivri brought in his family menorah and carefully helped Ivri to place the eight candles and the Shamash candle (for lighting the other eight candles), in preparation for the celebration that begins this year on 10th December. After learning how to sing the Dreidel song, Ivri surprised the class by gifting each classmate with a dreidel to take home. He was very proud to show his friends how to play the game and taught them how to pronounce the symbols on each side of the dreidel in Hebrew: נ (nun), ג (gimel), ה (hei), ש (shin). We discovered that the symbols stand for: “Nes, Gadol, Haya, Sham,” meaning “a great miracle happened there.” A big thank you to Ivri and his family from all of us in Year 1.
The children have also enjoyed learning how to read a set of simple instructions to make beautiful Stars of David to hang in our window next to the Diwali lanterns that were made last week.
In Mathematics this week, the children have been learning to measure length using non-standard and standard units of measure. They have used cubes to measure how tall they are and rules to measure the precise length of objects in centimeters. Being such a creative class, the children also invented their own game. They researched how to make an arrow, worked hard to create paper arrows and then challenged each other to see who could throw their arrow the furthest. They proudly recorded their results on a tally chart and used ordinal numbers to show who had won, or whether they had come in second, third or fourth. We had so much fun playing!
In English, we have continued making story maps based on the Diwali story and some children have begun to write their first stories in English, learning how to use capital letters and full stops. They have truly amazed themselves at the length and quality of their stories and how easy it has been to write them using their story maps to guide them through their retellings of this much loved story.
It has been a truly busy and fascinating week in Year 1.
YEAR 2
A very productive time was spent in Year 2 at EIS West this week: students worked on ‘y’ spelling words, guided reading with a story called “The Night Out”, adding and subtracting with 9, 10, and 11. Our favorite for these past few days has been a combination of science and topic! This week students explored changing shape with various forms of material…we tried tin-foil, play-do, and plasticine. With twisting, bending, rolling techniques practiced on play-do, we ‘fine-tuned’ our fine motor skills by making a Christmas tree out of plasticine. It was wonderful to see the students so engaged in an activity, and even more interesting to see our trees together to celebrate our different creative expressions! For topic we are rehearsing our December Celebration play, “Something Strange in the Forest One Day…”, where the animals of the forest learn how humans decorate a tree for the holidays.
We look forward to another fulfilling week to come!
