Winter Sing-A-Long

Thank you so much for starting off our winter break with such a lovely party! It was so nice to see all of you and your families and spend some time celebrating together. We, at Harmony, want to wish you all a safe and happy holiday season! Thank you so much for sharing your children with us, it really brings the joy of the season to our hearts. We will see you all next year! (2015??!! WHAT!!??)
I am going to be spending time with my loved ones so I will have more blog posts for you when we return.

oops! here are the pictures!!

These are the "pop"arazzi!

Celebrations Around The World

This week we had a chance to learn about several winter celebrations from here and afar. The students got to spin a dreidel, create beautiful crowns, dance to Feliz Navidad, create brooms from La Befana, and taste traditional cuisine from so many different cultures.

Here are some fun recipes to recreate some of our celebrations:
Potato Latkes these were delicious served with some warm apple sauce!
Panettone this is a quick bread type recipe that the kids really enjoyed with cranberries and orange zest!
Empanadas these are traditional to Christmas Eve in Mexico, but can be filled with any fruit you like!
Swedish Meatballs are delicious and kid approved!

Christmas/Winter book list

Here is an old blog post to help you find some awesome books for this magical time of year!

Gingerbread Houses

One of the kids favorite days during our winter fun and holidays theme is the day we decorate gingerbread houses! They work together to spread frosting, strategically place candies, and then finish off their creations with some small trees and gingerbread men. This is such a fun teamwork activity (and adding in a little sugar never hurts). Here are tons of pictures of the fun we had. Make sure to look for our decorated houses around the school.

and after our favorite part; TASTING!

Winter Small Groups

Our small groups are a time to break into age groups and do some more in depth studying.

The Shooting Stars have been using their time to make some name snowmen. They were able to compare and contrast the heights (lengths) of their names and work on making their letters more clearly.

The LeapFrogs and Puffer Fish created these super cool "snowflakes":

The Puffer Fish worked on some letter matching with these cute mittens:

The Cupcakes had tons of fun dripping colors over their frozen spheres: