May 17
After nearly two years together in Nitzanim, we love being together. We’ve worked things out time after time, learned language that keeps everyone emotionally safe, and we’ve grown in being able to see what’s going on with a friend and respond appropriately. It is such a joy to be a Nitzanimer these days!! We love being together!! …
Apr 25
What amazing children! What an amazing community we have together!
Apr 12
Nitzanim learned a new game this week for משחקים mischakim (physical activity, Hebrew, and community building). It’s tough to keep holding hands and work as a team! We couldn’t stop laughing as we played. The tag game: three children hold hands, and one of the three is designated as the person to avoid being tagged. One child …
Feb 21
Sometimes the best things in Nitzanim are unplanned. This year’s Nitzanim group loves to hear stories. For several months, children clamored for ghost, goblin, demon, and witch stories. Turns out there are many scary or spooky Jewish stories available for children, many of them by Eric A. Kimmel. Then we started reading Chelm stories. The …
Dec 05
When Shirah/Tefillah (Singing/Prayer) ends at 5:45, the after-party begins. It started with a group of (now) first grade girls who would stay and play for a half hour while their moms chatted. But this week, one of the moms was out of town, one of the four-year-olds dozed on his mom’s lap during Shirah/Tefillah, and …
Jun 01
Last week, we learned about how the story of Ruth that we read on Shavuot is about chessed — Ruth does chessed for Naomi by gathering barley for her. To act this out, we gathered our own “pretend” grain and ground it using a steel mill into coarse flour. This week we capped off the …
May 17
In Shorashim we have begun making “chessed cards”. In order to do this, the kids pick a shape, color it, and send it on a pretend “postcard” into their friend’s mailbox in Shorashim. Instead of a normal stamp, the kids get to stamp the first letter of their Hebrew name. Not only is it a …
Apr 13
Nitzanimers love to build. Our hands and imaginations work together to take our ideas farther. It’s great fun to build at the end of a unit, because we’re able to consolidate so much of what we’ve explored into a single scene that we envision. Here are some highlights from two days of building Mitzrayim (where …
Mar 26
This week in Shorashim we engaged with the images and objects of Passover. We learned about the seder plate and played with seder plate puzzles: We’re learning about the shapes of the seder plate. We ate and played with karpas (parsley): I made a parsley mustache! We played a matching game with objects from the …
Feb 03
This week I have been looking at how we see friendship at the Jewish Enrichment Center and how even 4 months into the program there are new ones being formed. On Tuesday, during musika (music) I walked in to find a Nitzanim boy and two Shorashim girls sitting together. The surprise was that it …
