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 – 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.

Class Update – Pre-School, January 2010

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!

Class Summary – Pre-school, December 2009

Since the Humanistic Judaism packets were such a big hit last month, the students continued to work on them again this week. We finished up the section on what it means to be Jewish and have now moved into what it means to be Humanistic. We’re talking about the fact that we below to a world family along with own family and the Jewish family we’ve been talking about. We’ll continue working on these packets until we’re through with them, a little bit at a time, as the student’s seem to enjoy them and we’re about to discuss challenging but important topics.

This week we learned another new word” be’vakasha, which means please. Because our version of duck, duck, goose helped the student’s learn the word mayim in the last session, we worked on learning the word be’vakasha in the same way. Everyone seemed to get it, but learning new words are hard so it would be great if the student’s could try and practice these words at home.

We also practice the student’s parts in the Chanukkah play with the middle’s class and everyone got to be at least two characters! The students did a great job mooing, meowing, neighing, and making noise as children. I’m sure everyone will do smashing at the real thing! To learn a bit more about Hanukkah before it starts, we also read a book about how one family celebrated Hanukkah, complete with drediels, latkes, and the menorah.

Class Summary – Pre-school, November 2009

This week we focused on a booklet about “what it means to be a humanistic jew.” This booklet includes discussions about what it means to be Jewish: some of which include that we are connected to a long line of other Jews, that Jews are doing all sorts of cool things and have done so for awhile, what kinds of philosophies we believe in personally. This is the section that we focused on mostly during this session. The students filled in their own philosophies, roots, and such by coloring in the pages. We also got to listen to some great Jewish children’s music as we worked.

We also learned a new word- Mayim! This word means water and we practiced it by playing a game of “duck, duck, goose” but substituting the words “water, water, mayim.” It would be great if everyone could practice this new word at home.

We then read the book “It Could Always Be Worse,” which is the story after which this year’s Hanukkah play is based. It’s a story about how, no matter how difficult things are, things could always be harder and the lesson is to be appreciative of what we do have.

The last thing we did was work on a project with the class above ours to create chew toys for small animals at the humane society. This project coincided with the group’s year-long goal of tzedakah for animals in need.

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