Around the World: Shalom from Israel!

This made for a great Table Time activity this
morning when the "teacher" overslept a bit
and hadn't had coffee before her pupil woke up!

Shalom from Israel! Our home preschool Around the World unit would not be complete without a visit to Israel. The curriculum I have created for the year will include a longer unit on Israel closer to Yom Ha'atmazut (Israeli Independence Day), but we did make a two day stop on our worldwide trip this week. We began our visit by learning about the Israeli flag using a playdough mat (just a print of Israel's flag that I laminated), some blue playdough, a rolling pin and Star of David shaped cookie cutters.

We used a couple of books we already had at home to assist us in our learning journey.

This book has great photographs of various destinations in Israel and takes the reader through the spectrum of the rainbow--including Hebrew words for color names!

We teach our son a variety of words in Hebrew and Yiddish. This book has great illustrations and a variety of useful vocabulary words that would enhance any Jewish home!

Our Israel visit was also a great opportunity to incorporate a long-term project we've been working on as part of our Jewish curriculum. We've been creating a book of the Twelve Pesukim, twelve Torah passages selected by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson as the twelve most important pieces of Jewish literature for children to learn by heart. My son has been learning to repeat and say these passages from the time he could first speak and he feels so proud to be creating his own book.

We had a lot of fun pretending to visit a kibbutz and playing with the farm animals there. He loved singing some of his favorite farm themed songs while we were at it!

We took a creative spin on learning about the Dead Sea and made some "Jaffa Orange Scented Dead Sea Bath Salts." To make your own at home...
You will need:

• Epsom salt
• Sweet orange essential oil
• yellow and red food coloring
• a ziplock bag and container/scoop for the salt

We scooped some Epsom salt into the ziplock bag. My son decided we needed four cups! To that I added several drops of essential oil and a few drops each of yellow and red food coloring.

Next it was time to seal the bag and shake it up! 

The results smelled wonderful and took on a lovely shade of orange! My son is very excited to try a bit in his bath tonight. These would also make a great homemade gift and could be made with any of your favorite essential oils and with or without food coloring.

 The bath salts smelled good enough to eat, so the last part of our trip included some edible (or drinkable) fun with squeezing our own orange juice! I recently purchased a simple citrus juicer from Walmart to use with my son. There are certainly a lot of electronic options out there, but I love the gross motor, fine motor and sensory development aspects of using the old fashioned kind. We love to do kitchen activities together and they can be very involved sometimes when it comes to baking and cooking. This was about $4 well spent and proof that you don't need a lot of tools or a lot of ingredients to have a great experience getting your kids into the kitchen!

We talked about and observed the parts of the fruit: the rind/peel, the pulp/fruit and the juice inside!

We did not have any Jaffa oranges available but we had recently bought some Cara Cara pink oranges and they were up to the task of being squeezed into some very sweet and tasty orange juice! It took some practice and demonstration to learn how to use his hands to squeeze and turn the orange halves simultaneously, but he mastered it and was quite pleased.

As an added bonus, he actually enjoyed trying (and finishing) what we made! Many times this is not the case with our baking and cooking adventures...

We had a great time on our visit to Israel. We have just a couple of more stops now to the continents of Australia and Africa where we will playfully and artfully explore the vast array of wildlife on a pretend Safari! Until then, happy playing!