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.
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!
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.
Today we got to celebrate Tu B’shevat together! We started the day with song, of course, and then went to our classroom to say our “shaloms” to one another. We then worked on our Humanistic Judaism coloring books and talked about what it means to be a Humanist. We talked about how we are all connected to one another, in a big world family, just as we have a family in our own home and a Jewish family. We found it helpful to talk about the “chain” of connection that we learned about when discussing our Jewish family.
After that, we moved on to celebrating the earth. We learned the hebrew word olam, meaning earth, and practiced the word by playing our very fun “olam, olam, world” version of duck duck goose. We always have a good time with that game! We then went downstairs to read a story about appreciating the earth and talking about what we can do to make the earth a better place. Then we go to doing just that- we planted some seeds- basil, thyme, and a flower- and hopefully we’ll all see them grow big and tall soon enough!
At the January juniors class session, students learned about Yiddish and the persistence of many Yiddish terms in contemporary English speech. Students received copies of these Yiddish words/terms commonly used in English–written out in standard Yiddish orthography–and transliterated them using a phonetic guide to the Yiddish alphabet. Then members of the class took turns sharing their work, reading aloud words like “schlep,” “shpiel,” “bagel,” and “mazel tov” to the group, and we played a large-group matching game to pair the Yiddish words with their definitions in English. Afterward, students wrote humorous short stories/monologues incorporating all of the Yiddish vocabulary discussed, and read completed work to the class. The morning wrapped up with more service-project discussion; the group voted on different project options and moved forward with plans to volunteer at a Twin Cities soup kitchen (details forthcoming–project is planned for April).
EvaRCohen