Happy Hannukah! The Jewish celebration begins on Sunday so we spent some time learning about it in class through stories and song. The song was, of course, the catchy "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, they made it out of clay" and after listening it, we decided to do just that!... we began the process of making our own dreidels out of clay. Next week we will paint them and learn how to play the dreidel game. In French, we've been learning some new games to help us reinforce our letter sounds, as well as practicing whichever word list we happen to be working through at home at the moment. We took our quiet reading outside this week on one of the clearer days and also enjoyed entertaining some local daycare kids with our French singing as Madame played the ukulele. The outdoors proved to be a good venue for practicing some vocabulary about shapes, as well. We built shapes with our bodies and then tried drawing them in the dirt or making them with sticks. We've begun including some counting games and card games (number and colour recognition) in our morning play time, too. We love counting and comparing the number of dog bones we have, and playing UNO and Go Fish. These also happen to be great games for building our vocabulary and helping us learn to accept defeat and be a gracious winner. You may have heard us talking at home about the "animals in our brains". We have been reading a book all about it. (Yes, unfortunately it's in English, but these are important concepts that Madame feels are worth teaching even if they are in English!) The animals in our brains represent different parts of the brain, helping us to learn about how our brains work and how we can have better control over our reactions. We spent an especially large amount of time learning about "Anthony the Ape" - the fight, flight or freeze response. Anthony is there to protect us, but sometimes he gets confused and he thinks he needs to fight, run or freeze when we're arguing with our brother and sister, when we get upset with a friend, etc. We need to practice telling Anthony to chill out and use some strategies to help calm him down, like taking several deep belly breaths. If we can start to control the animals in our brain, we gain so much power for regulating our emotions! Together in class, we did a directed draw of Anthony the Ape. It may have been pouring rain on Thursday, but that didn't stop us from getting outside to the garden again and getting...very wet. And muddy. Extra pics...
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