Happy Holidays Mariposa !

Mariposa children have been hard at work with cooking and crafting these past few weeks.

Cooking and Birthdays:

We enjoyed two birthday circles, celebrating Nathan’s birthday and  Christin’s birthday!  We made ants on a log and had tons of fun using the spiral apple peeler. We also baked apple crumble for Christin’s classroom birthday treat  and it was throughly enjoyed. Adding on to our cooking experiences we challenged ourselves to make challah for the very first time and it came out great! The class also enjoyed having latkes with apple sauce and sour cream for morning snack. The children continue to enjoy music with Aaron and art with Julianne each week.

Letter and Sound Study :

In our letter and sound studies we continued with the letters L, M and N. Our take home letter projects are turning out great and the children are enjoying the opportunity to work on their letter collages at home and have looked forward to presenting them to the class. The joy they bring when they get to present and wait to find out who gets the next turn is exciting to see and we are very proud of them.  A great big thank you to all of our families for supporting this new experience, it would not be such a success without your support.

Holiday Lights :

With the various winter holidays we had our  lantern walk at the UAC, thank you for joining us. We read stories and learned more about Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa. We learned that each of these celebrations all have something in common and that is the use of candles and the importance of light within all of them.  After reading various stories and looking at pictures we realized that the Menorah that is used for Hanukkah uses nine candles; eight candles representing the eight nights  and one candle which is used to light the other candles . Similarly for Kwanzaa there are seven candles held in a Kinara which is the Swahili word for candle holder. The candles used are  black, green and red and each of the colors are the colors that are part of the African American Flag. Black represents unity which is the unifying candle or as stated by the children the ” helper candle”, this is the candle that lights the other candles on each night. Red represents struggle and green represents hope. There are three green candles, three red candles and one black candle which make up the seven candles for each night of Kwanzaa. We also did a weaving project that included these colors.

The week was wrapped up by having a cozy hot chocolate and pajama day and creating with our holiday themed makers cart.

Happy holidays to everyone and thank you for all your support.  We look forward to seeing you in the New Year!

Warmly,

The Mariposa Team