Class update – Juniors, February 2010

The February lesson for the juniors’ class focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We began the morning with a short history lesson, and students learned about the conflict’s origins in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that paved the way for the founding of the state of Israel and made refugees out of the millions of Palestinians displaced by Zionist forces. Students wrote and performed short skits about this history, and then did some more in-depth thinking about the effects/consequences for Israelis and Palestinians of different developments stemming from expanding occupation of the territories. After this, the class watched selections from a 2001 documentary film called “Promises,” which looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of seven children—Jewish and Palestinian—who live in Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Students discussed the clips, their feelings about the Jewish and Palestinian children’s experiences, and their thoughts about what could help achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. After the film discussion, we shifted gears, and students split into teams and wrote some Jewish trivia questions; then teams posed questions to each other Or Emet-quiz-bowl style! Class wrapped up with a visit from Miriam Jerris, and students had the opportunity to share some thoughts about Humanistic Judaism and the day’s lesson with the rabbi.

Class update – Pre-School, March 2010

March’s class focused on Passover. We started the day by working through our Humanistic Judaism packets. We will finish these next class and everyone will take them home! Everyone has learned a lot about what Humanistic Judaism means through these coloring books, both by reading through it and by making up our pictures to illustrate it. After that, we read a book explaining what the holiday of Passover is and different objects or words that we all should know when we celebrate Passover. Once we learned all of those great words and objects, the students did a scavenger hunt for many of those objects. I’d hidden pictures of the contents of a seder plate, along with some pictures of matzo, around our classroom. Everyone searched the room for the pictures, and once we found them and identified all of them, we made a big seder plate together with the pictures. It was a great way to introduce the students to the different foods they would see on their seder plates at home or in friends’ homes. After learning all about our seder plate, we went upstairs and worked with the Middles group to make matzo covers for the Or Emet seder. Hopefully everyone enjoyed seeing our students’ great artwork on their tables during the Seder!

Class Update – Middles, March 2010

We worked on phase II of our Mezuzot project…painting! The painted mezuzot are ready to be filled with their scrolls and mounted to doorways. Muriel Sterne provided our Hebrew lesson while also teaching us about Passover. For the last portion of class, we were joined by the pre-schoolers. We all worked side by side making beautiful Matzoh covers for the Or Emet seder and to take home.

Class Update – Middles, February 2010

In our last session we enjoyed learning and singing new songs with Rabbi Miriam and the rest of the adults…although the students may not have enjoyed hearing Scott singing “Peace Be With You” over an dover again throughout the class, but he just couldn’t get it out of his head!
Once again, we learned played a trivia game. This time the focus was on Purim. See the PowerPoint presentation to see all of the interesting things we talked about reelated to Purim; from foods we eat to the Babylonian origins of the characters in the Purim story.
The students had a great time making their own Mezuzot out of clay and our looking forward to painting them during our next class. Each student was asked to work with their family to decide what they would like to put on their scrolls that will go inside their finsished Mezuzot. In the PowerPoint are some ideas families could use to decide what to write on their scrolls.
While working on our craft we had a visit from Rabbi Miriam. It seems the kids were excited to meet a real Rabbi!

Class update – Pre-School, February 2010

Today our class had a wonderful day learning about Purim! We started the day off, as usual, by singing with the group. We then went downstairs to say our “shaloms” to one another. It’s so nice to have six of us now because our greetings are that much louder!

After that, we worked on two pages of our Humanistic Judaism coloring books. Today we talked about what it means to be a humanist and a part of the world family. We talked about how we care about other people, even ones that we haven’t met. We also talked about the “power of people” and everyone came up with some things that people have the power to do, like buildling things, making people happy, helping sick people, and reading and writing books. We also learned the Hebrew word adam, meaning people, and colored the hebrew letters of that word.

We then started to celebrate Purim together! We talked a little bit about the holiday in general, then we made our own groggers. After we made those groggers, we put them to good use! We read the story of Purim and everyone learned to cheer and make noise when the names Esther and Mordecai were read and to boo loudly when the name Haman was read. Everyone certainly had fun with that activity!

We took a little break after that and enjoyed some Hamantaschen and started to work on coloring and making masks of Esther and the King. I hope everyone will have lots of fun with the groggers and masks when they celebrate Purim at home or at next week’s carnival.

Note: The Purim story in class had a few sections that the children may have questions about, but sections that were a bit above our preschool and kindergarten level were taken out. The story began with Esther becoming the queen, therefore excluding any mention of Queen Vashti, Vashti being kicked out of the kingdom, and the contest before Esther was chosen. Additionally, Haman asked that Mordacai be sent away in this version (not hung) and Haman was sent away in the end (not hung). Howevver, there were mentions in the story of Haman not liking Jews and that he wanted the King to order to have them killed. In class, the children understood this issue on a basic but clear “Haman=bad guy” and “Esther=hero” level and we discussed it in that way. Please let me know if you would like help in answering any questions your child has about this topic.

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