We are enjoying our second week of study involving Passover. This week, we have reviewed and deepened our understanding of the story of Exodus. We have also begun to study some of the symbols of the story that are present on the Seder plate.
The children continue to enjoy “doing a play” of the story of Passover while Morah Larissa reads a book to narrate. This has nurtured and deepened their comprehension of the story. They enjoy taking turns being Moses, his sister Miriam, his mother Jocheved, the Pharaoh, etc. We pretend that the entire classroom is Egypt, creating the Nile River, the Red Sea, and even the mountains to where Moses was exiled by the Pharaoh.
Our deep understanding of the story of Passover has enabled the children to work on re-telling it themselves. We are working hard to record their words to create our own Haggadah, the book used at a Passover seder. The children have had the opportunity to look at several kinds of Haggadot. The children take turns telling parts of the story, and each part is recorded on a small strip of paper. Using smaller strips of paper allowed us to work hard on sequencing the story. This is especially appropriate considering that the word Seder translates to order, or sequence, in Hebrew. Learning to tell a story in the correct sequence is important to children’s literacy and language development, as well as in building organizational skills necessary to continue learning later in life. The children will bring home a class Haggadah next week, complete with their own illustrations.
Our dollhouse is now completely transformed into Pharaoh’s palace. The people that we use in the block corner are in the middle of their own transformation, as the Owls have been using fabric and pipe cleaners to create costumes for them so that we can pretend that they are the Israelites. The children delight in opportunities to use a variety of recycled and other art materials creatively. Besides being enjoyable, such opportunities nurture creative thinking, problem solving, and invite children to express their knowledge and ideas in a variety of ways. We are looking forward to using the decorated dollhouse and decorated people with the “Baby Moses” dolls that we made last week to re-tell the story using small props.
We have also begun to create puppets this week, representing Miriam, Moses, and even Pharaoh. The children spontaneously performed their own puppet show of the Passover story on Wednesday morning. It was impressive to discover how much they remembered!
On Tuesday, we learned about the word symbol, and explained that a symbol is a picture or an object that tells us something. We went on a symbol hunt in our classroom. We found symbols everyplace! There are symbols on the toy road signs in the block corner, on the recycling bin, and even on children’s clothes. Next, we read a book about the various symbols present on a Seder plate: Passover: Celebrating Then, Remember Now.
One of the symbols that we have focused on this week is charoset, or the mixture of apples, wine and nuts that represents the mortar used by the Israelites to build cities during slavery. We made our own charoset using apples, raisins, cinnamon and grape juice. It looked sticky just like the paper maché we were pretending was mortar last week when we created our pyramid! The children tasted the charoset with crackers for snack on Wednesday, and greatly enjoyed the treat.
We have also begun to enjoy some Passover music. A new favorite is “Lotsa, Lotsa Matzah,” about the many foods present at the Passover Seder. We have also enjoyed singing “Frogs Here, Frogs There,” about one of the plagues. Later in the week, we began learning the Four Questions as a song, which are usually asked by the youngest Jewish child at a Seder.
Asking questions and understanding the story of Passover are central values to the celebration of Passover. In honor of this value, and in support of the children’s increasing ability to ask questions and drive their own learning, each child was invited to write a question to take home on Thursday as “homework.” Please help your child to find an answer to their question via books or internet research. We encourage you to not directly give your child the answer, but to give them the tools to find the answer. The children can dictate their answer on the paper that they took home and bring it to school on Tuesday morning. We are looking forward to finding out what they learn!
Shabbat Shalom, Morah Larissa and Morah Kate
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