Monday, November 23, 2009

Winter Holidays, Day Six

This week we will focus on non-Christmas holidays. I would recommend, again, that you base the length of time that you spend focusing on these holidays on the preferences of your children and families. I have never had students that celebrated any holiday other than Christmas during this time of year, so I viewed this time as an opportunity to expose them to something that they are not familiar with, but still spent more time talking about what they were familiar with, Christmas. If you have families that do celebrate Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, then spend more time researching and finding activities for your students to do-or better yet, ask for help from your families!

For the first couple of days, we will talk about Hanukkah. For storytime, continue reading If You Take a Mouse to the Movies, but try to find an age-appropriate book about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa that you could either read at morning meeting or in addition to your main storytime book. You could sing “Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel;” the Kwanzaa song that I used to sing with my class went like this (tune: Bingo): There is a holiday I know, and Kwanzaa is its name-oh! Candlelight and food so good, all around my neighborhood. Love and thanks for all that’s good-and Kwanzaa is its name-oh!

Today’s art activity will be a Hanukkah suncatcher. You will need to prep this ahead of time. Cut out a large (the size of a sheet of paper) Star of David and glue it to a piece of waxed paper for each child. Have your students either cut or tear blue and white paper and glue it to their waxed paper. Once the glue has dried, you can either run it through the laminator (my personal favorite) or cover it with another sheet of waxed paper or with Con-tact paper. These really do look great hanging in the window!

For fine motor, have your students cut out a large Star of David themselves and glue bits of blue and white construction paper or other blue and white collage items to it.

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