Someone made the comment that this was a vase with flowers, but it is in fact a menorah!
This is the first year that Little Wonders has a child who celebrates Hanukkah (as well as Christmas)! We are so excited, and we are learning so much from him! We have been reading books about Hanukkah, and learning about the traditions.
We read and leaned about the menorah and that Hanukkah has 8 nights. They get a present every night for 8 nights, but the children who celebrate Christmas get a lot of presents for one night. Hanukkah is a celebration of lights, in fact, it is called the festival of lights because of the "oil lasting for 8 nights instead of one"!
We also read that latkes are a traditional food in the Hanukkah celebration, so we got a recipe and made them ourselves!
Some of our older children sounded out and read our ingredients for us.......
Once we had all of the ingredients, we all gathered around Ms.Ambreen to learn how to peel and shred a potato.
We could do it all by ourselves! ;0)
But wait!!!! A major math problem occurred! Mateo was documenting the stages of our cooking. He drew the latkes and drew little circles inside to represent the eggs. Wow, he drew a lot of eggs! Trevor said, "that is a lot of eggs, we only need 3 eggs"!
So, we counted Mateo's eggs, and he counted 25. Now, how do you write twenty five??????
We heard different combinations of numbers, but Carter said, "a two and a five!"
So, it was time for us to practice writing 2's and 5's!
Ahhhh, ok, now that the math work was done, we could get back to cooking! ;)
We were so lucky to have Sam's parents join us on this day to tell us about the Hanukkah tradition and help us cook the latkes..........
They made sure everything came out ok!
And boy did it ever come out okay! They were a hit! The children LOVED them! We ate them with applesauce and sour cream.......
MMMMMmmmmmmmmmm.......
While we ate, Sam's dad read us a book about Hanukkah.
When he was done reading, we went by the door to watch him light the menorah. (we made sure to do it by the door so that the smoke alarm wouldn't go off ;0) )
We were all so interested!
We watched as he used the one in the middle (green) to light the rest of the candles. It was the third night of Hanukkah, so we lit three candles.
Here is one picture of Mark's menorah after our day of learning about Hanukkah! The children got so much from their experiences today.
It was great to have Sam's family with us to share their traditions. It is really adding to our knowledge of how different parts of the world experience the holidays during winter. We would love to learn about our other children's traditions, please feel free to send materials, pictures, books, etc with your child before the festival.
Please feel free to talk to Maryam if you have questions or ideas!
Just as a reminder, Little Wonders will be closed Friday, December 24th, Monday the 27th, and Friday the 31st. We are looking forward to a wonderful new year!
Someone made the comment that this was a vase with flowers, but it is in fact a menorah! 
We read and leaned about the menorah and that Hanukkah has 8 nights. They get a present every night for 8 nights, but the children who celebrate Christmas get a lot of presents for one night. Hanukkah is a celebration of lights, in fact, it is called the festival of lights because of the "oil lasting for 8 nights instead of one"!
Once we had all of the ingredients, we all gathered around Ms.Ambreen to learn how to peel and shred a potato.
We could do it all by ourselves! ;0)
But wait!!!! A major math problem occurred! Mateo was documenting the stages of our cooking. He drew the latkes and drew little circles inside to represent the eggs. Wow, he drew a lot of eggs! Trevor said, "that is a lot of eggs, we only need 3 eggs"!
We heard different combinations of numbers, but Carter said, "a two and a five!"
So, it was time for us to practice writing 2's and 5's!
Ahhhh, ok, now that the math work was done, we could get back to cooking! ;)
We were so lucky to have Sam's parents join us on this day to tell us about the Hanukkah tradition and help us cook the latkes..........
They made sure everything came out ok!
And boy did it ever come out okay! They were a hit! The children LOVED them! We ate them with applesauce and sour cream.......
MMMMMmmmmmmmmmm.......
While we ate, Sam's dad read us a book about Hanukkah.
When he was done reading, we went by the door to watch him light the menorah. (we made sure to do it by the door so that the smoke alarm wouldn't go off ;0) )
We were all so interested!
We watched as he used the one in the middle (green) to light the rest of the candles. It was the third night of Hanukkah, so we lit three candles.
Here is one picture of Mark's menorah after our day of learning about Hanukkah! The children got so much from their experiences today. 
We peeled the balloon off, and we were left with 3 balls of ice!
We read in a book that salt would help make the ice stick together. Many children tried to hold the ice, but they started crying once the ice got their hands cold, so Bishop and Luke took the initiative to pour the ice and hold the balls of ice in place!
Okay, two balls in place, now for the third.........
The ice wasn't really sticking well together, so Alexandre said, "I know!! We can use glue!" ;0)
hmmmmm........ lets see if the glue works.........
We weren't so lucky with the glue, so Bishop poured more salt, aka "sauce"!
Luke was a master at holding the ice! The cold didn't phase him at all!!!!
But what a tragedy......our snowman crashed with all the glue and salt we poured on it! Of course our children didn't give up! We stacked the ice right back on top of each other.
Now the snowman needed eyes, so the children tried to DRAW the eyes and buttons on with a marker!
That didn't work, so Alexandre drew some, cut them and tried to stick them on.
The children grabbed q-tips for the hands and feet!
Some of us were so excited that they wanted to draw some snowmen.
While, the others tried and tried to keep our snowman together, he kept melting away and breaking :0( We took the snowman outside and watched him melt away in our "hot temperature" (Ashley reminded everyone why ice melts)
But fear not!!! This is not the end of our quest to make a snowman in "warm temperatures"! We will keep you updated on how our experimentation goes!
