January 29th, 2017. Fifth Grade.

To begin our day, grade 5 had T'filah. During this time, Rabbi told us that we're in the story of Exodus in the Torah. This exodus didn't happen only once though. The first Jew was Abraham, so the first Jew to go to Egypt was him as well.

The Jews were in Egypt for more than 400 years, and they did well there, but there came a time where there was a new pharaoh who didn't want anyone "different" in Egypt, in his land. Eventually this caused the Jews to become slaves, and these slaves needed G-d's help to escape. In those days, no one would have told the pharaoh he was wrong because people saw him as a god. Had someone told him beforehand, a ton of suffering could have been avoided. From this, we learned that if we say "stop" before anything bad can happen, we can avoid the consequences.

Next we had Kehilah. To get our attention, Cantor played a little Simon Says with us, but he only spoke in Hebrew! This helps us to familiarize ourselves with the Hebrew language in a way that isn't rehearsing prayers. We also had a "time-dividing ceremony", or Havdalah. By doing this we are dividing Shabbat from the rest of the week. Our snack for today was goldfish and water.

Back in class we were assigned new seats, then we collected tzedakah. Then Mrs. Zamir put up "red words" on the board. As a continuation of what we discussed last week, our first phrase was "Don't separate yourself from the community".

As our teacher continued to put words on the board, all of which connected in some way, we attempted to guess thwart the Hebrew words meant in English.

Next, we were asked if the Tanakh can be explained as anything other than the literal explanation, and it can be, but it then becomes Midrachim, or commentary on the Tanakh. In our lesson today, we need to realize that our actions don't just effect us.

We then split into groups of four. In these groups, we were given envelopes. Inside them were pieces of a puzzle. The objective was to make 5 perfect squares of the same size with only the pieces provided, with no communication whatsoever. The meaning of this exercise was to show how difficult accomplishing anything can be without help from a community.

Next, we had Hebrew. Before we began, we were told we will be working the duck pond at the Purim carnival, which we will begin working on next week. Our lesson in Hebrew today began with us saying, in Hebrew, what the weather is like today. We were able to say that today is Sunday and it's snowy, and the temperature is very low outside. Our workbook page was 41, which talked about the Amidah. In it, the word givurot is prominent- it means strength and power. This prayer' purpose is to show that strength and power can help us achieve things, but it isn't the only nor the best option we have.