April, 2022

April: Passover and Rainy Weather

What a special month for us, preparing for Passover and learning about rainy weather!

Featured Rainy Activities

Making rain sticks: fine motor, sound experimentation

To recreate rainstorm in our classroom, the children clapped their hands, stomped their feet, and rubbed their pants to make the various sounds of the storm. A few friends shared that they had sticks at home that sounded like rain! We decided to make our own! We chose tubes, coiled pipe cleaners, and then filled them with beads!

Raindrop spelling: cvc word building, encoding skills, initial sounds, blending, vowel sounds

Children picked various words on umbrellas and used raindrop letters to build them!

Raining Cats and Dogs: fine motor, counting 1:1, solving math stories

We learned about the idiom, "It's Raining Cats and Dogs," and then counted out how many cats and dogs landed on our umbrella, we used this activity to practice addition and subtraction up to 12!

Rain boot patterning: fine motor, patterning

We worked hard to complete some tricky rain boot patterns!

Rainy day coloring; fine motor, properties of water

The children drew on their papers, first in sharpie, then in washable marker. When they brought them outside in the rain, the saw that the colorful markers spread around the page, but the sharpie stayed right where they put it!

Featured Passover Activities

Matzah Ball Soup Machine; creative thinking, different ways to make ten!

Harry decided we should make a Matzah Ball Soup Machine! His friends helped him create, test, fine tune, label, and decorate his creation! Then we all took turns trying it out and finding different ways to build five and ten!

Matzah Cover; fine motor,

Children decorated their matzah covers with fabric pens! Some chose to use stencils!

Making Pyramids in the Sand; fine motor, creative play, 3D shapes, sensory exploration

Children made cubes of kinetic sand, with their hands or the mold, and then stacked them to form pyramids. It was hard work building even a tiny pyramid, and we discussed how much harder it would be to build a real one!