Family Exploration and Celebration

Looking for more information on what to expect on December 12th? Look no further!

Here’s how to get the most out of Family Exploration and Celebration: 

1. Choose an arrival time for your family. 
2. Fill out the daily symptom screener for every child in your family, including siblings who are not enrolled. 
3.  What you’ll find in the room:
   1. A visual overview of our project process. It’ll be on the wall directly across from you between the two double doors. Visit this wall first to see the process that guided children’s theme exploration over the last 9 weeks. Your child may be able to point out examples of what they did in each stage of the theme.
   2. Projects. A large wall with first through fifth grade projects from our theme, Avraham v’Lot. Your child listened to the Torah text; played the text with building materials, watercolor paint, collage, and more; and asked questions and shared interpretations. Each child chose a particular topic or idea to wrestle with in their creative project. See this piece for an overview of big questions children asked in this theme and how children made connections to their own lives. 
   3. A large wall documenting nursery and kindergarten children’s learning through this theme. Children played Jewish text with several types of creative expression, including dramatic play, puppet-making, and building. Children were drawn to building and returned to it over and over. We continued opening up new angles and offering new materials for building to support children’s growing ideas about this text and their lives. See this installation for a visual of how children’s ideas develop from simple ideas about a story into complex, synthesized interpretations of the story. Along the way, children practice essential lifelong skills, like collaboration, empathy, and respectful disagreement. 
4. Where to begin?
   1. Go through the installation as a family or take each child individually. You may bring children upstairs for reading and Hebrew play with a morah while you take a child through the installation. 
   2. Read the text aloud together. For children in nursery and kindergarten: Genesis 13. For children in 1st – 5th grades: Genesis 13 and Genesis 18.
   1. Explore your child’s project. 
   2. Explore someone else’s project. 
   3. Build or create as a family. 
   4. Reflect 
   5. Closing ma’agal (circle) to celebrate and say l’hitra’ot (see you again!)