Today children had the opportunity to work in small groups to make a skit highlighting their year. It seems like some of our special memories include pointing during the yom huledet (happy birthday) song, reading Hebrew together, writing on the aleph bet wall, making our bench, and so much more! Click on the video to hear directly from the …
Category: Hallel
Jun 03
Nitzanim makes a mosaic!
This week in yetzirah (art/creativity), Nitzanim worked together to create and finish their final project for the year, a mosaic bench. For the last two weeks, children collaborated to create three symbols, one for each of our three main themes this past year, Hallel, Haggadah, and Sh’mitah. Nitzanim thought, talked, and drew to invent unique, simplified …
Jun 01
Why These Symbols?
Last week I wrote about Nitzanim planning the symbols for our final project, a mosaic bench! The symbols for our three main themes, Hallel, Haggadah, and Sh’mitah help us remember our explorations and discussions from the theme. Here are some of the ideas that children shared about why a music note is representative of our …
May 27
Revisiting Explorations and Starting Our Final Project
Last week, we began our end of the year project in Beit Shorashim and we are well underway! We have decided to make a book that every child will get to take home with them to remember our year together. This book will include pages that are both designed by our whole community with our …
May 25
Nitzanim Plans for Our Final Project
To celebrate and reflect on our year, Nitzanim is working on a special yetzirah (art/creativity) project–a mosaic bench! The children worked together to design the symbols for the bench, which represent our three main themes for the year: Hallel, Haggadah, and Sh’mitah. Children revisited our themes through photographs and then created sketches of potential symbols. The …
May 21
Revisiting Meaningful Explorations as We Close the Year in Shteelim
This week in Shteelim, we wrapped up our Sh’mitah theme and moved into a time of reflection and remembering of the past year. In our final conversations about Sh’mitah, Shteelimers connected the Sh’mitah year to Shabbat as they came up with similarities and differences between the two traditions, and asked why we observe both in …
Dec 17
Cooking and Creating to Celebrate Chanukah
This week in Beit Shorashim, we were pretty excited that Chanukah was finally starting! To begin to get us in the mindset, we began the week by doing a Latke relay during משחקים (mischakim-games) and using dancing scarves while listening to some Chanukah songs. We also finished the final stages of building from our Chanukah story and came …
Dec 16
Hallel Theme Video
During this theme, we explored Hallel as the universal impulse to thank, praise, or celebrate in moments of great joy, or relief, or gratitude. Biblical stories offered children examples of different motivations for hallel, various modes of expression of hallel, and multiple settings for hallel. We explored artists’ expressions of Hallel – painting, dance, poetry, …
Dec 15
The Chanukah Creating Continues!
Over the last two weeks, Nitzanimers have been exploring three different endings to the Chanukah story. Children are building each ending with novel materials (materials that we don’t usually use for “building” such as glass beads, small rocks, etc.). Today we started our third and final ending to the Chanukah story, which comes from the …
Dec 10
Building Our Chanukah Story
This week, Shorashimers continued to read our Chanukah story but this time we started to picture what the different parts of the story look like. We had three different areas in Beit Shorashim where we could build all of the parts of our Chanukah story together. We used blocks, marbles, colored chips, wood sticks, natural materials, …