School update: Joseph

Joseph!

-- Hannah and Emily
02/24/20120

The excitement has been building ... For the past 2 weeks we've been learning all about the story of Joseph and his many colored coat to prepare for going to see the grade school perform the show "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." We've been retelling the story in class together and making some of the characters from the story. We really enjoyed describing our own dreams and imagining how Joseph would interpret them. On Wednesday, Rabbi Holman came to our class and gave us a dramatic retelling of the story, which had us giggling and jumping in to help tell the story. He was very impressed with how much of the story we already knew. Today we went to see the show and were totally awed. The kids sat for the whole show enthralled which is the highest praise these critics can offer :)

This week was also exciting because when we got to school on Tuesday morning our amaryllis bulb had bloomed! As we compared the blossom to our prediction drawings it became clear that this flower was very different from what we were expecting.

On Friday we wrote stories using "Rory's Story Cubes". These dice have simple pictures on each side which, as the children roll them, inspire new directions for our story writing. For example here is Bella's story; the dice she rolled showed an arrow and an alien: The arrow said "turn your hand the other way. No, turn your elbow the other way." Then a giant came. And then there was an alien who lived in space and he jumped on the giant. The giant ate him because he was very mean. The End. We look forward to continuing to explore using the dice to spark our imaginations.

Next week we'll begin learning the story of the holiday of Purim and, most importantly to our class, learning new songs!

Our Kindergarten will be celebrating the 100th Day of Kindergarten on Monday, February 27th. Stop by the Kindergarten while dropping off your child this Monday and discover how the children have been preparing for this special day, and focusing on the number 100 in so many different ways!

Here's a link to an article the staff found very interesting. It explains why play-based preschool experiences foster later success: click here