What Happened at our Grade 5 & 6 Retreat...

Grade 5 & 6 Retreat

Our fifth and sixth grade students had an amazing time at their Retreat! The theme of our weekend was Escape from Egypt and our programming focused on the transition from slavery to freedom.

We started our time together by bringing in Shabbat with lighting the candles and enjoying Shabbat dinner.

Then, Mr. Stone and Jeremy Cronig led us in Shabbat evening services. It was awesome to pray together!

After services, we  divided up into small groups. We were all given a challenge to complete, but some groups were not "free" and had limitations set on how what they could use to accomplish the challenge.

We ended Friday evening with a fantastic night hike where we learned about the history of the area and walked on a river bed that millions of years ago was under water.

In the morning, we worked together to create our own Shabbat morning service.

During the Torah service, we took time to break out into small groups to explore different quotes from the Pesach (Passover) Haggadah that articulate the transition from slavery to freedom.

After services, we participated in a series of group challenge activities. When the Israelites left Egypt, they made the transition from slavery to freedom as a group and it was this transition that solidified their peoplehood. In this same way, our group challenge activities required us to come together as a group like the Israelites to balance individualism and communitism. We also explored the idea of Egypt as a "narrow place" (the Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which literally means "narrow") and what it means to come out of a "narrow place."

Then we enjoyed some great free time!

We ended our time together with a Values Auction. First, we discussed what makes a society a free society. Each group was given a limited amount of money and we then needed to decide which values were the most important to us and bid on them. If we didn't win the value we wanted in the auction, we needed to figure out which value to replace it with. There was a lot of great energy and competition as everyone tried to create the best values-driven society!