Hold it right there folks. You are entering Beit Shorashim v’Shteelim and we are learning to sloooooow down and pay attention to all of the amazing things in our world that we can be thankful for in honor of our new theme, בְּרָכָה (berakhah – blessing). This week, we are focusing on ברכות (brachot-blessings) we can say before eating and for natural phenomena.
Over the past several days, we came up with SO MANY examples of amazing things in the world and times when we could say a בְּרָכָה, and even some potential reasons why someone would say it in the first place.
“I heard it today- right now for כִּבּוּד (kibud-snack).”
“When I climbed up a volcano and it felt like an earthquake in the ground from the lava.” “When I saw a real blue whale”. “When I saw dinosaur bones at the Natural History Museum.”
“When I saw a rainbow with my baby sister and I felt reallly happy, it had some new colors like aquamarine and chartreuse- like 16 colors.” (This is a direct quotation!) “When I saw a rainbow I felt like I could sing because it was so sweet, rainbows are the most beautiful color in the whole wide world.”
“At the beach there was a huge wave and I went underwater and I did a summersault for the first time.” “When you’re about to dive into a swimming pool.”
“The moon!”
“At Channukah.” “For the Shofar, I think.” “When everyone does prayers in the room downstairs, the place where you do Jewish prayers.” “That’s called the sanctuary.”
“When someone died.”
“My birthday.”
“When you move to a different city and you don’t have what you had at your home.”
“At Bubby’s house!”
“Because it’s good.” “Because it tells a story.” “Because of the people who gave us food.”
And throughout the week we found even more when we…
Made Shabbat dinner in the kitchen:
A בְּרָכָה about to happen over the challah!
Drew the beautiful things we see out of the window with our binoculars:
“These are the squares we walk on outside and these are the trees.”
Created designs of natural wonders on our lightbox:
“The blue is the sky, everything else is lightning.”
Gathered leaves for our Beit Shorashim:
How many צבעים (tzva’im-colors) can we find in our leaves?
Played משחקים (mischakim-games) with our (brachot-blessings) for כִּבּוּד. This week we tried a modified version of an old favorite- put all the foods with the same בְּרָכָה together in the same hoop, and figure out which בְּרָכָה we say for them!
“We say בּוֹרֵא מִינֵי מְזוֹנוֹת (Borei minei m’zonot) for all of these.”
When we take time to stop and notice the world around us, we can come up with a lot of reasons to say “wow!”. Thank you Shorashim v’Shteelim for showing us so many, whether outside, in our classroom, or among our קבוצה (kvutzah-group) itself.
