Eating Up Hannukah

Each day of Hannukah we will be focusing on different aspect of Hannukah. (Since we lose two school days of festivities, yesterday we did this super fun activity.)

Today we looked at the food of Hannukah. When I asked the students to name 'Hannukah foods', their answers were great.
They practiced making some of the Hannukah foods out of play dough.

 We went to the multi-purpose room and joined K-2nd in decorating (and eating) Hannukah cookies.

Then we decided to make latkes. 

"Where do we get potatoes?" I asked.

"The ground!" Elchanan accurately announced. 

"Yes! But we don't have any in the ground around TDS. So where else can we get them?" I asked.

"The kitchen?" Elazar suggested. I told him there weren't any.

"MacPhersons!" Naftali cheered! Because of last week, we are experts in MacPherson's.

We marveled over the many types of potatoes and purchased an assortment.

Back at school, we began a 'grate' task.

While half the group cooked, the other half worked on a frying pan craft project. Those of you who have one, the game is meant to work on coordination and numeracy. Mostly it is just fun.

 When our great work was done, Morah Racheli set off to the kitchen to make latkes. We had a discussion about how when we made pasta, we needed water+heat to cook them. For popcorn we only needed heat. For latkes we need the special Hannukah ingredient: oil!

 The students took turns supervising.

 And then we ate! We had the latkes, jelly donuts, and bumelos. 

You might not believe me, but many of the kids were more enthusiastic about fruit, veggies, and grains, than they were about these treats. Many described the latkes as slimy (the correct terms would be oily and delicious), didn't like jelly, and wouldn't try bumelos. 

Tomorrow we will just have carrot sticks, apple slices, and whole grain crackers ;). Just kidding. But tomorrow we will be talking about Hannukah, history and archaeology.