Sapa Yafa -- Tzipor Afor

Today we worked on the Hebrew letter Peh/Feh (Same letter except with/without a dot inside). I prepared flashcards with the 2 sets of rhyming words (Sapa Yafa = pretty sofa, Tzipor Afor = gray bird), with the Peh/Feh written in red.  I put "Sapa Yafa" on the sofa, and "Tzipor Afor" on the large stuffed emu (long story....)

Here M is making a Peh/Feh out of Tinkertoys.  R is helping:

"Hey, big brother, what does this say?"

"Sapa. Hey, you just messed me up! Now I have to start over!"

"Sapa.  Yep, that's good!"

Map and Globe

Before we got started, the boys had their own plan.  Here they are, carrying the stepstool out of the bathroom and into the living room.  Hmmm.......

Silly boys!  They just wanted to sit together!

OK, down to business.  Here is Israel, right where Africa, Asia and Europe meet:

And here is Boston, on the edge of the purple blob in North America........

R likes the globe better:

Two by two

Today we revisited the idea of counting by twos.  M picked each shape, then counted all the pictures up to get consecutive even numbers. Triangles, stars, circles, squares, smileys and pumpkins!

And there's the self-portrait, signed with stickers.  

That's my name!

Writing with stickers is fun!

R is enjoying the stickers, too.

How do I get these off my fingers, Imma?

Multimedia production: Stickers, marker, and toy firetruck!

M put himself on TV:

Dla'at means Pumpkin

To get ready for Halloween, I drew a pumpkin for each boy on orange cardstock, and let them at it. M actually did a nice job copying the word down on his paper, but I didn't photograph it.

R just loves doing everything his big brother does.  Here are the 2 of them playing in a big cardboard box:

More World Map activities

M colored in the World Map today.  Look how accurately he is staying inside the lines now!

Then I made him another World Map, and cut it out as a puzzle, with velcro backing for each continent. He knew just what to do.  You can even see R's hand in the background -- trying to help.....

South America!  All done!!! (Well, Europe is a bit lopsided, but then again, what else is new....?)

Latest self-portrait:

M and R playing nicely with the geometric blocks:

Simchat Torah

Getting ready for Simchat Torah, I showed M how we can make a toy Torah scroll. After making the first one, he wanted to make another one. Here he is, writing the first 10 letters of the Aleph-Bet on cardstock.

He had a bit of a hard time with Alephs looking like X's, so he wanted to start over.  He made all those straight lines himself!

BaSukkah Shelanu

M knows about adding small numbers on his fingers.  I tried to connect that with the numbers laid out in a sequence on the table, so he could see that +1 means 1 to the right, and -1 means 1 to the left.  This will take more work, but it was a good introduction.  R liked it too.

Then off to enjoy the Sukkah!  M wanted to do the Lulav blessings again:
Yemina, yemina, smola smol
Lefanim, akhora
Lemata, lemata, lemala, lemala
BaSukkah Shelanu!
(Right, Left, Front, Back, Down, Up, in our Sukkah!)

And here are M and R drawing in the Sukkah:

What a nice day!

How do you spell Sukkah?

Today's lesson was to write the words Sukkah and Sukkot, showing the difference between the "oh" vav and the "ooh" vav in the two words. M was more interested in drawing alot of cool pictures:

Eventually, he wanted to go out to the Sukkah, so he sat down and wrote it:

And here he is holding it up in front of the Sukkah itself:

R was no slouch today either, he did a fair amount of scribbling, and wanted me to write his name on it so he could scribble over the letters:

And he looooooves reading:

More Sukkot prep

Today we put the strips of paper we made yesterday into paper chains for decorating the Sukkah:

First I put the paper through the last loop....

....staple the ends together....

....Looks pretty good!

Misparim v'Misparayim

....or, Numbers and Scissors, but that doesn't sound as cool in English...

With the Sukkah up in the back yard, we are getting started on making decorations -- paper chains! What a great opportunity for M to practice his cutting skills:

Then he wrote numbers in order on pre-cut strips, to be made into paper chains tomorrow:

Outside time -- more numbers, this time with hopscotch!