What Happened in Grades 5 & 6 on Sunday, December 13...

(Grades 3 & 4 had great days today too, but due to some technical difficulties we don't have blog posts for them.) 

Grade 5

Today Grade 5’s T’filah service was led by a familiar face. Julia Ullman took Cantor Lawrence’s spot today, and we talked about what we’re thankful for in the light of the holiday we’re celebrating, Chanukah. Then we played a little Chanukah trivia. Afterward we went to our classroom to have Kehillah. During Kehillah, we talked about what we’ve gotten for Chanukah while we had a yummy snack of pretzels and water. 

After we had our snack, we had art. During art our discussion was about things that symbolize Chanukah and why. For instance, one of us explained that the chanukiyah represents Chanukah because it is only used on this holiday. Then we went broader and talked about how the symbols of Chanukah can also be symbols of Jewish freedom. Our project today was to make a sheet metal ornament depicting these symbols of freedom.

Back in class, we did some fun review games, but first, we got snacks of M&M cookies, mini doughnuts, and brownie cupcakes - our very own Chanukah party! Our first review game was Bingo, and this game was used to review vocab from the Hebrew prayers we’ve been studying in Hebrew class.

Our next game was Jewish Basketball. We were asked questions about topics we’ve studied over this semester and, if we got the right answer, we shot a basketball for points. In the photo is an example of us working as a team and discussing the answer to a question.

Grade 6

While we're still celebrating Chanukah, our madrichim are already starting to plan for Purim! Some grades are going to try to create booths for the carnival, and today we spent some time brainstorming what kind of booth we might want to do.

For our class Noam, who is here from Israel, came in to do activities with us and he answered any questions we had about the Israeli culture and what he likes to do for fun there compared to what we do in the U.S.  

Noam showed us how he would write his name in Hebrew if he were in Israel.

We got to play charades with Hebrew slang terms and the English translation. We had to act out what the term actually meant and how you would put it in a sentence. Every time we guessed the correct translation, we got a specific amount of points.

Today at the start of Hebrew we reviewed the Hebrew words from the Mi Sheberach and what they mean as we sing them, using the help of our madrichim.

We played Hebrew baseball to practice decoding the prayer. When someone on our team read an entire line on their own correctly, they get to move to the next base. The team with the most runs wins!