Oil and Water

Oil and Water

We had such a fun week at school preparing for chanukah!! Now we are all ready to celebrate the 8 nights of chanukah!

This year Morah Avigayil used an innovative "audio" tool to teach the story of Chanukah. She began the story with calm relaxing background music to bring the children into the energy of the peaceful time that our story begins with. Life in Jerusalem before the Greeks took over the Bais Hamikdash. Some of our friends really enjoyed the calm music and said that it makes them feel happy. 

Our children went to see the beautiful Bais Hamikdash center Morah Shiras class put together. 

Suddenly the music changed! It started to sound scary and angry

Faiga and Moshe play scary background music to emphasize the fear the Jews felt when they heard the Greeks coming. The happy and sad music really set the mood of the story for the children to understand how it felt.

Our friends took turns sharing and acting out different parts of the story. 

The Jewish children are hiding in a cave and learning Torah. When the Greeks came they pulled out the dreidels.

Matisyahu and the Maccabees stood up and said you are not doing the right thing!

and they fought against the Greeks.

The music turned happy again, the Jewish people returned to the Beis hamikdash!
But it was dirty and filled with bad things, and there was no oil to light the Menorah, they searched and searched, but only found one sealed bottle of pure olive oil, enough to last one day.

To really bring the idea home of why the oil needed a seal, we did an interactive activity.

We invited the children to search for bottles of mouthwash in the Bais Hamikdash and then we tasted it. Hey! That's not mouthwash! Its green water they discovered! Then we found one bottle that looked much different, it had a plastic seal around the cover. When we opened it, it tasted super minty just like real mouthwash. (don't worry, we spat out all the mouth wash :)

So the children were able to understand that the seal shows that nothing has been done to it.

Learning about the process of olive oil being made, we watched an interesting video that followed a boy making his own olive oil in Israel.

Oil rises above water, It doesnt mix in. So too when everyone around me might be making a bad choice I can be like the oil and not mix in.

Pre-K did an experiment with oil and we watched the colored water fall through the oil. It didn't mix in.

We eat oily foods on Chanukah to remember the miracle of the oil.

We made a Potato latke kugel in our class.

Peeling and grating the potatoes and onion was such hard work, that everyone had to cry about it. 

Oh, wait! that was the onions!

Dreidel Play

Trying to make a dreidel using colorful clay.  Using a dreidel to create beautiful spin art for our shields.

Dreidel patterning 

Using dreidels to identify if the number is even or odd.

Writing practice with chanukah words. 

Rozie and Bela Riva even wrote their own Chanukah story called The Dreidels Who Talked 

 Our whole school collaborated to make beautiful drip art brick Menorahs, inspired by the bricks of the Beis Hamikdash.