January 22nd: 2nd and 5th grade

To begin our day, grade two went to a presentation in the social hall. During this presentation, two camps came to visit. One was a sports camp, offering a wide spread of sports to indulge in. The other camp was a science camp that promises fun, crazy experiments pertaining to the different fields of science. Each incorporates Judaism, and prayers are said before meals.


Next we had a snack of pretzels and water for kehilah, after saying the blessings over our food of course.


During t'filah today, cantor told us about a story that comes every year: the story of Passover. That being said, the next upcoming Jewish holiday is Pasach. During this holiday we discuss slavery, G-d's ten plagues, and the Jewish people's trip from Egypt to Israel.


Back in class, Mora Julie gave us chocolate and coloring pages. The coloring pages were of Hay, our Hebrew letter for today.

 
Today we had art. During the beginning, the art teacher had us tell her about Gimilut Chasadim, and how we're running the food drive to exemplify this. Our topic in art was tzedakah, which is collecting and donating money to those in need. We collect tzedakah every Sunday in our class. Our project today was a tzedakah box, so we can collect money at home too.

Sunday, January 22nd: 1st grade

We start the day, by sharing what made our week exciting with the rest of the class. Then we go to have services ( kahilah) with the Cantor, where most of us along with the kindergarteners and second graders go up in the front to sit with the cantor. Then we get to think of the things we are thankful for this week like the clothes on our body  and for having loving families.

We talk with the cantor about Passover and each of he plagues.  Cantor asks us to wonder why god made it so difficult for the Israelites to leave, we so come up with a few answers of why we think he did this including: wanting them to learn a lesson such as to not be greedy and appreciate what they get or if you want to get something done you have to work hard for it. Cantor tells us he thinks that God wanted the people to understand how powerful he is and that the Israelites should be worshipping him because he can do so much and be incredibly helpful if hey are nice to him.

We get to stick around with the Cantor because we get to be a part of a special ceremony in a few weeks, our consecration. It is so special, because there was once a time when we couldn't freely sing out that we were Jewish. Since our consecration will be on tubishvat, we learn a song about the trees through each season.

Cantor brings out a Torah for us, and we realize, it's made out of wood, which comes from trees! We talk about what else trees can give you, including paper, shelter, and things to build houses with. As we notice, trees can give us a lot of stuff which we will end up having  a song about. 

5th&6th Grade Retreat-Prep Session!

Yesterday, we got to explore a giant map of Israel!
Ziv (our Israeli friend) sent us on a mission to discover a little more about this country.....

 

Sometimes we had to work together and some times we had to include everyone to accomplish the task.

It was a lot of fun! We learned about Israel's geography and some of the different cultures that live there too. In the end, we also got to sample some different types of Israeli Chocolate that Ziv brought for us!

 

 

Sunday, January 8th

This week was the first Sunday we were back in Religious School after winter break.

First grade--
We are in Tiflia today with the Rabbi leading us in our prayers because the Cantor is on vacation today. We talk about the SOUL and that it's the part of you that we can't really find, but we think about it in different ways.  it's something that god put into us and made each one of us very very special. Everything that moves around and breaths has a soul. 

 

This week we finish reading the first book of the Torah,we talked about creation and now we talk about getting out of Egypt. the rabbi translates each book in the Torah so that we can understand, for example the second book, Exodus means getting out which is what we will talk about next. This weeks torah portion tells us that we need to be good and involved in our Jewish community as well as our American community. 

 

We get to listen to our story, and tell Ms. Levy what we learned for our devar Torah for consecration, which is coming up in a few weeks. We learned that trees should be well taken care of, that tubishvat is the birthdays of the trees, that sharing food doesn't only make the person getting feel good, but also the people giving feel good and each of us individually learned something new. 

 

We go to art, and we get to make a collage that has to do with the book we had read earlier. We make the background, and then we each get to "plant a tree" in our different landscapes.

6th Grade

Ms. Schulgasser helped the 6th graders do a fun art project with our names! We explored the black and white space of our names, and this made us think about what type of name we want to earn for ourselves.