In Anafim (“Branches” for 2nd and 3rd grade), our final projects are really coming along. Throughout this whole theme, we have been practicing sharing our ideas, connecting with our peers’ ideas, and respectfully disagreeing when we have a different idea. The children have done incredible work on this skill to the point where their conversations often just flow on their own – with children exchanging ideas about the text with care and curiosity.
The children have continued to exercise this skill in their final project sessions. Several children have chosen to do projects about what it would be like to be different characters on the teyva (ark). Here is a conversation between children about the different feeling words they have chosen:
- Child A: Bored and tired. Because there’s nothing to do and he’s been working really hard trying to get the teyva to work.
- Child B: Super tired and all that because you’ve already built a huge teyva to save thousands of animals and now you’re driving a huge teyva in the middle of the flood.
- Child A: I take back bored. He has a million things to do. He has to make the boat work and everything.
- Child B: He could get bored. If I was him I would make a tube that sends food to everybody.
Here’s a conversation between children about one child’s artwork and how she could show her idea:
- [Morah: Will you show Adonai?]
- Child 1: I’m not sure how.
- Child 2: You could make Adonai like kinda saying I don’t care.
- Child 1: Maybe I’ll try that.
- Child 3: How you could express it is make like the wrong thing to do and put an X over it and then the right thing to do and then a check mark over it.
Though everyone is working on their own artwork, these projects are truly quite collaborative!
