Delicious challah for Friday snack

Today was such a beautiful day both outside and inside the classrooms. We had a large number of children attending today and all of us were busy working, playing, singing, dancing and doing special things with our friends and teachers. Upstairs, Beckett and Miya enjoyed hitting the “hane” with the “hagoita” and Nico showed really good eye-hand co-ordination when doing this too. He was using his left hand even though his dominant hand is his right hand. We continued talking about being fair and kind in the classroom and re-read the book “I can be fair”. We made two equal teams with three children in each team and then we did a puppet show using the small wooden dolls; demonstrating how to play when you are in a team. We spoke about “love” and our teachers wanted to know who we loved. Jamie said that he loved his daddy; Noah loved his mommy and daddy and of course we all had a turn to say who we loved. Then we looked at our “Life Books” and pointed to photos of the people that we loved. There were so many that we loved and each time we looked at another photo, we remembered someone else that we loved. We have such big hearts to be able to love so many people! We have a special cushion in our classroom that is shaped like a heart and it has hands coming out of the sides of the heart. We used this to give hugs to all of our friends. Then our teachers said that we could specifically choose who we wanted to hug and so we did.  We sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Love is something”. We added flowers to our painting that we had started earlier in the week.

Downstairs we spent the earlier part of the day cooking and preparing food for our friends. We also had fun with the slide that our teachers help us make with plastic blocks and today instead of rolling balls down it, we let some of the cars go down the winding hill. We saw how fast they go when they are on a steep hill. We invited our friends from upstairs to come to our classroom as we had something special for today. Yossi’s mum, Chana baked two special breads for us and she brought them to school for us to eat. However, Shelley wanted to explain to us that these were not just two ordinary loaves of bread; and in fact they didn’t look like regular bread. They were braided on top just like some girls do when they have long hair. Yossi also helped teach us a few things. He told us that the bread was called “challah” and they have a special cover on them. Before you eat them there is a prayer that you say in Hebrew and then you can eat the challah. Yossi said the prayer together with Shelley. We learnt how to say thank you in Hebrew  when we received our challah. The words are “todah rabah”. The challah was soooooo delicious and we want to say a big “todah rabah” to his mum, Chana, for this special treat. We had our huge work in progress laid on the table today and our job was to tear large pieces of newspaper and paste the shapes onto the art work. We had fun tearing the paper and noticed that there were so many different shapes that we had made. Some were long and some were squarish and some were big and some were small. We used glue spreaders to put the paste on the newspaper. This is the same glue that we use when we do papier mache. It is all soft and squishy. We hope that everyone has a good weekend and we look forward to seeing you next week again.

Love Shelley, Kana, Darren and Goh