On Blessings

Following up from last week at Havurah, our classroom continued to explore the themes that lay hidden in the Blessings we say every single week over grape juice and challah. Today we focused on the first word ברוך Baruch - Blessing.

We had a very intimate group this week - only six students, so each student had the opportunity both to work individually and as a team, sharing relevant thoughts and ideas related to the topics we discussed.

We began by asking the question, "What is a blessing?!"



Sydney suggested that it is something you say at a Holiday, a Birthday party, or before eating a snack. Rachel followed by adding that we bless our food, thanking God for everything we are given to eat.

Following this conversation, the teachers explained that Blessings make certain experiences even more special than they already are by turning our focus and attention to the moment, and announcing out loud that we are grateful for the opportunity that has been presented to us. The rabbis understood that so much of life goes unnoticed, moments slip through our fingertips without truly grasping the experience at hand. We explained that one can say a blessing over almost anything -- seeing something beautiful like a rainbow or a mountain, doing something new for the first time, eating bread, wine, fruits, vegetables, grains, and all other snacks, and maybe most significantly -- we can bless the people in our lives that make it special to be alive every single day.

Afterwards, we went around the circle and made a list of just those things -- any space, experience, or person we wanted to bless today. Rachel and Max said they would love to bless their family, Max specifically said he wanted to bless his brother. Meanwhile, Ethan and Simone brought up sacred spaces -- Ethan sent blessings to the two couches in his home that he loves to jump on while Simone was thankful for her classroom that she finds herself in six days out of every week! Lastly, Rachel, Max, and Ethan were full of blessings for things we find in nature -- waterfalls and rainbows.


After this wonderful conversation, we had free-play in which there were several options to explore. The first option was to return to our topic from last week HaOlam העולם - and to build the world out of blocks. Max, Simone, and Blake built planets and sunbeams! Meanwhile, Rachel and Sydney chose to help prepare for the Havdalah ceremony later in the day by putting together little bundles of Besamim - spices, made from cinnamon and fresh herbs, that we later passed around to our fellow community members. And finally, Ethan worked within his Aleph-Bet book to depict the blessing he spoke of earlier.

As class progressed, we read a marvelous story about Baxter the Pig who wanted to be Kosher. We discussed what it means to eat Kosher food and noted that many different Jews have various practices in terms of the way they choose to eat healthfully in order to benefit their heads and their hearts.


Finally, we played a search and find game in which we divided up into two teams and flipped through pages of Hebrew books in order to locate the Hebrew letters we know thus far -- Aleph, Bet, Gimmel, Daled, and Hay! It was a tie game and each team did terrifically!




We closed the day with a family sing along and Havdalah service -- the ceremony that differentiates Shabbat, a day of rest, from the busy work week ahead.

We hope to see everyone in our class reunited after two weeks of vacation. Enjoy and see you on March 1st!

Building Ha'olam!

Welcome back Havurah! It was great to see everyone again and get back into the Havurah swing of things. Although February will be a short month for Havurah (we do not meet February 15th and 22nd) we are off to a great month! 

We started out our day by discussing and exploring Brigitte's family torah scroll, prayer book (siddur) and bronze chai (life). We thought about the question "why do people keep the torah and prayer books?" In agreement, our friends answered "to read!" 

It was great to see these objects being used and appreciated with respect and thoughtfulness. We then had a real treat as Ani actually read from the handwritten torah scroll! 

Joyce then came by for some fun and exciting storytelling. We worked more on collaborative storytelling and worked together to create an exciting story of kings and queens, witches and dragons!

As we reflected on the year so far, we thought about some of our most memorable learning moments. Our work with the hebrew word aretz came to mind and we decided to work more with words that we use often at Havurah, and turned to our blessings that we say each time for snack! We decided to explore the word OLAM or ''Ha'olam" meaning THE WORLD.

We began by creating our own world, by collaboratively drawing it!

   

We considered what the actual earth looks like, the universe we live in, and the things on earth that we have. Some favorites were beds, chairs, people and the sunset. We will continue to think about Ha'olam and our place in it. 

We are looking forward to seeing everyone next week! In the meantime, continue to think about stories! As we move forward we will begin to think more about our own personal stories and how we share them with the community. Have a great week everyone!

Family Mitzvah Project Day

We were so happy to reunite with our class at Havurah this week after a long hiatus and before a second long break ensues. It was a special day indeed! For the first hour we had our regular Havurah class, we joined together to sing and welcome each other back into the classroom and we played a game in which we truly got in touch with our emotions as they make themselves evident in our faces and body language. We showed feelings such as Happiness, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, and Confusion first with only our faces, and then with solely our bodies. We realized how difficult it is to isolate one aspect and not automatically find yourself doing the other, too. You should have seen these faces, they were amazing! There is no question we have a class-act of thespian talents in our midst!

As usual, we enjoyed Challah and Juice, and showed off our enunciated utterances of the Shabbat blessings.

Then, we had a conversation about Harmony and Difference, after we read a joyful and heartening book about all of the different children in the world singing a song in unison together. We explained that Judaism is a religion of communities, and therefore we sing the same blessings, and do the same rituals and traditions as many Jews do all over the world!

We played another game in which we acted out animals from our story about the Creation of the World, and the children guessed what each other were. There were sharks, lions, monkeys, bears, zebras, horses, cows, galore!

Finally, we introduced the idea of MITZVAH -- acts of loving kindness and goodness for the world. We invited our parents into the classroom, and after a short slide-show from Brigitte about the Sarah Childcare Center in Tanzania, we began our Mitzvah project of writing letters to our new friends at the Center. We used Swahili phrases such as Mambo Rafiki to speak the language of our friends and added our own images, drawings, and designs to show the children what life is like in NYC at the JCC. We know they are going to be so thrilled to know they have friends here in America and we are surely hoping to get letters and drawings from them, in return.

For the last half hour, we had our usual family sing-along with Paul as we came together in harmony once more! Enjoy the winter days and see you all on February 1st!

A fond farewell...for now!

Dear Families,

Over the past two and half months we have explored, discovered and grown together and we can't wait to continue to do so in the new year! This was Havurah's last class before winter break, and we will resume the weekend of January 11th.

Today we discussed stories, creations and heroes! With another visit from Joyce (storytelling extrodinaire!), we got another version of the creation story that we discussed earlier in the year. We then created our own story beginning with the creation of our own main character... Mr. Eyeball Pants! Mr. Eyeball Pants is a sea, land and air creature, with 10 human legs, 6 wings, a birds beak and 6 silly eyes. Be sure to ask your child about him!

Since we are building towards creating our own story, the children were given some "thinking homework" for over the break, which is to think about their own animal creation! We will be creating these next time we are in Havurah.

We also were introduced to a new Hebrew letter today, he! Thus adding a fifth letter to our aleph bet books. Speaking of things that start with a "heeee" we got to talking about the word hero. Kids thought about and discussed heroes they were familiar with, from batman to "my mom, my dad, my sister." We then illustrated heroes of choice in their aleph bet books.

Due to technical difficulties, photos are not available this week. In the meantime, enjoy this image of The Creation Of Man 6 by Marc Chagall. Another interpretation of a story we have been talking about a lot.

If you wish, talk with your child about this image. What do they see? Ask them for descriptive words. What sorts of feelings does the painting have? Happy, sad, exciting... why? How is this different from what they imagined the story to be in their heads? We've discussed a lot about the creation story, is this similar or different to what they saw in their minds?

Have a happy and healthy new year! If you have any questions over the break, please feel free to reach out to us at any time. See you in 2014!

The Beginning of our Second Cycle

On Saturday at Havurah we got reacquainted with one another as we hadn't seen each other in a few weeks! We even welcomed a new student into our classroom and so decided to revisit all of our familiar blessings, Hebrew letters, art projects, and songs.

We began the day playing Simon-Says...in HEBREW (B'Ivrit). The kids repeated the words back to us as they gestured to their face.  

Aynayim are eyes
Ahf is nose
Ohznayim are ears
Peh is mouth

We will continue to practice throughout Havurah!

As always, we blessed the grape juice, the Challah and prepared for our meeting with Joyce by telling stories of Channukah and Thanksgiving.

We were so excited to welcome Joyce -- the Storytelling Queen into our classroom. She lit up the face of every child in the classroom with her magic story wand, the Tale of Channa and her Shabbat Dress as well as the epic Magic Dreidels. The class is truly beginning to learn what it takes to create a story and realizing that they themselves are storytellers of their own.



Below you can find the story we composed as a class with cards of images Joyce brought to class. It  was a beautiful collaboration as each student spoke with a unique voice adding their own twist to every change of the sentence:

Once upon a time there was a castle in the middle of a big lawn -- there was a road leading up to the castle, and inside, people were living. There was a princess reading in the castle, and there was a mouse trying to annoy the story by talking in front of the middle of the story. Outside the castle there was a ferry in the sky. In the castle, there was a king who was looking for the princess. The king found a key -- the key was to the room where the princess lived. There was a witch who was trying to unlock the door but she couldn't. The witch got stuck in the bottle - somebody put her in there. The dragon was trying to get in the door but he thought it was water and then he blew fire and then the fire flew back in his mouth and then the dragon went away. The dragon found a diamond ring when he was walking away, then he opened the door. The princess found the diamond ring and it became hers. And then lightning struck the castle. And then a pirate boat came and then the queen walked off the pirate boat. She got off the boat and went back to the castle and she said, "What's Going On? Where's my diamond Ring?!" and the search began again for a new diamond ring.
To Be Continued...

To finish the day we had an assortment of activities -- we built kingdoms and castles with blocks, Nate specifically had a blast playing with the different shapes and sizes of two Russian dolls, and of course we contributed to each of our Aleph-Bet books with markers, stamps, and glu-able letters.

Finally we made the letters we know so far (Aleph, Bet, Gimmel and Daled) with our bodies both in yogic positions and also together as small teams!

Hello! Shalom! Sholem-Aleykhem!

This week we had an especially musical day, with a special program: Traveling the Yiddishland with Dmitri Slepovitch. Children were invited to gather and learn about Yiddishkayt and popular Yiddish songs, performed by ethnomusicologist and acclaimed Klezmer musician, Dmitri "Zisl" Slepovitch. There was singing, dancing, and we even learned a bit of Yiddish. Little did we know, we already know and use Yiddish in our everyday life! Did you know 'Bagel' is actually a Yiddish word? Later we had a visit from Paul, as we continue to get ready for next week's Chanukah party (get ready for quite the concert!). 

We also continued to explore Hebrew letters as we also got up and moved our body in this fun interactive letter hunt! Beginning together, we overlooked several Hebrew letters built out of blocks and waited for various letters to be called. 

After a letter was called, we raced to find the matching block letters (without pushing of course!)

 Once a letter was found, we sat as a team around the letter we had found. This was not only a fun way to learn our Hebrew letters, but it was a great way to get our bodies involved! 

The End of our First Cycle

This Saturday we had both completions and new beginnings!

We had our last day of our first specialty -- ceramics, and there we put our final touches on our Menorahs with gorgeous paint colors. Following this theme, we LEARNED BLESSINGS, told STORIES, and DISCUSSED the holiday of CHANNUKAH. Of course Paul came to sing our favorite Chanuukah songs. During story-time, we learned about all the special symbols and components that are relevant to Channukah -- the menorah with eight openings for light along with a ninth Shamash, jelly doughnuts and warm latkes, golden coins called GELT, DREIDELS, and, as Quincy put it: the best thing of all -- the warmth of family and friends.

We continued our conversation/artistic representations on the seven days of creation. We filled in our creation circles with the specific category of worldliness that was created on each day. (See last week's post for a recap).

Finally, with the most eager of anticipation, we filmed our our first short film! We will make a creative video of each day for the next few weeks as we move into our second cycle -- storytelling!

Next week we are organizing a field trip to the place for stories... the library! We will be sending out an email with more details.

We are also looking forward to welcoming our parents/guardians into the classroom Saturday, November 23rd celebrate Channukah -- the Festival of Lights and the closing of our first cycle!