JCP Downtown: Jewish Community Project

November with Amitzim (1st Grade) Teachers Shira & Omri

|  Print This Post

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been working with the children discussing Shabbat.  We spoke about what it means to us as Jewish people and of course we celebrated Shabbat in class with by baking Challah. The key focus of the Shabbat unit was to understand how it’s integrated into the lives of Jewish people both here and in Israel.  We discussed various aspects of Shabbat such as cuisine choices, resting, and the blessings.
We’re delighted that blessing המוציא, “hamotzie”, over the bread, and “בורא פרי הגפן”, ” boreh pri hagafen”, over the wine(or in our case juice) went very well, and we hope for the future the blessings can be used at home.
The Challah baking activity was a fun and creative project because after all Shabbat just isn’t the same without Challah, and the children were very creative with their bread braiding.

Following the shabbat unit we discussed Genesis and the creation of all things, the story of Adam and Eve, and made visual representations of the garden of eden using water color paintings.
For Channukah we recently made the miraculous pitcher of oil from clay; this after a retelling of the story of Channukah. As we’re both natives of Israel we emphasized that Channukah is also known as the festival of lights with some key hebrew words such as “אור” (”Or”, light.) and “חושך”(Choshech, Dark). Currently we’re working on improving the conversational Hebrew skills of the children now as every class session is opened and closed with “שלום כיתה”, hello class, and “שלום מורים”, hello teachers.