Rock, Paper, Scissors, Parashah Ha'azinu!

*Pertaining to Parashah Ha'Azinu (Deuteronomy 32:1-32:52) 

With Yom Teruah (Rosh Hashanah) this week, we had an abbreviated preschool week, but it was fun. To learn about the holy day, we made a cardboard shofar and glued on the picture of Moshe declaring "Ha'azinu" and the stars and moon from the weekly coloring pages here on aish.com. Also using the coloring page for the verse that compares the teaching to rain ("May my teaching fall like rain"), we glued the Torah raindrops to a  rainstick craft found here.
We decorated it with puffy fabric paint for raindrops. 

Also for Yom Teruah, we made our own apples and honey plate. I improvised upon an idea found in the back of the book "Apples & Honey"." I simply cut out a red apple from posterboard and glued it onto a paper plate, used foam leaves and brown cardstock for stem, and cut down a yogurt cup and wrapped it in cardstock for the honey dish. The Hebrew word for honey, davash, was cut out from the aish.com Rosh Hashanah coloring pages found here.

Our Torah verse this week was taken from Deuteronomy 32:3 & 4: "Come, declare the greatness of our G-d! The Rock! His work is perfect!" We painted a couple rocks (from my Dead Sea collection) and made a holder for them that said "The L-rd is my Rock!" from Psalm 18:2. The craft idea is here.I simply used a disposable coffee cup bottom for the holder. These cute little rocks have become one of my daughter's favorite toys! She carries them around the house. :)

Thanks to a couple shows on Nick Jr. my little girl loves dinosaurs, so this week for the letter D, we made "dinosaur fossils/footprints" which I found on one of my favorite homeschooling websites, www.icanteachmychild.com. You can see her instructions here. This was a lot of fun, and since they contain only coffee, salt, and flour, the fossils are really easy to make. The fossils smell like dirt and old coffee, but I wouldn't give them to little ones who would try to eat them (they kind of look like cookies!) We only have one plastic dinosaur, so we used other animals as well. After they were dried out, we tried to match the animals to their footprints. 

Also for letter D, I filled the sensory tub with dirt and put some plastic gardening toys in for her to dig in it with. For extra fun, I gave her some sunflower seeds to "plant" and some plastic bugs (which she did not like). It was great, but don't make the mistake of closing the tub up with all of that in there in humid weather! When I opened it again, it was growing something nasty. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't sunflowers! The sensory tub has been a real trial and error experience for me, but it is disinfected and ready for something else! :)

Our Hebrew letter this week was gimel, which my daughter knows from the dreidel game! I used the Hebrew word for camel, gamal, on the akhlah.com worksheet here and glued it onto a brown piece of cardstock and we made a desert scene for the camel. The camel picture was from a coloring book, and we glued on Styrofoam packing material painted brown. Thanks to a friend in Florida, I also had some sand to glue on under the camel's feet! 

Additional activities included painting with Q-tips and mixing primary colors to see what colors we could make, which was fascinating to my two-year old! We also made camel paint footprints with small plastic camels, and did worksheet for number four.

Hope you had a blessed Yom Teruah! 
~Joanna