It was a short week, but it was filled with learning about various cultural celebrations for the holidays. We started by making piñatas to recognize one of the ways that Christmas is celebrated in Mexico. We went with an easy plastic cup version of a piñata this time rather than the messy paper maché version. And it turns out that it's just as exciting when the candy comes out of a cup! We learned that in Haiti, children put their shoes on the porch for Santa to fill with presents so we very excitedly placed our shoes on the door mat one day before recess to see if "Madame père Noël" would come. It turns out "he" did! (It was a very sugar-filled week...heh.) One of our favourite new songs is the Jewish "dreidel" song, making up part of Hannukah celebrations. Click here to view some other awesome, catchy versions of this song. We couldn't just sing about making dreidels out of clay without trying to make our OWN out of clay! For those of us who did this activity with Madame last year, this year's clay is actual air dry clay rather than the plasticine that did not hold up well last year. We're excited to paint our dreidels next week! But we also took the opportunity to play with some real, pre-made dreidels and learn how to play the game. First, a Hebrew lesson... We used nickels for the game, which also gave us an opportunity to continue recognizing the coins and practicing counting by 5s. We even got to perform our play for the French Kindergarten/Grade 1 class and we did a fabulous job! Madame brought in a hot new toy this week - a circuit maker! She plunked it down in front of us and told us she wasn't going to help... we had to see if we could figure it out on our own! It took us a little while, but soon we were creating all kinds of things - disco lights, music, and even helicopter toys... often by improvising on our own without looking at any picture directions. We also got a sneak peak of our big buddies' entrepreneur fair creations this week! It was fun to check out all of their creative ideas and some of us even made some purchases.
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