A Hidden Gem 💎

This week, we dove into the story of Purim. Our friends acted it out beautifully!
Theo, as Achashverosh searched for a new Queen and chose Esther.

Esther, did not want to become Queen because it meant leaving her Jewish home with Mordechai. Mordechai, told her not to reveal that she was Jewish, so Esther carefully hid her Shabbat candles, her siddur, and her tzedakah box in the palace.

The name Esther in Hebrew comes from the word “hester”, which means hidden.

We went on our own “hidden treasure” hunt and searched for hidden things, like gemstones! The children all agreed that gemstones are not easy to find. You have to dig deep in the ground to discover them.

We learned that Hashem’s name does not appear openly in the Megillah. At first glance, the story might seem like one big coincidence… but when we dig deeper, we discover the hashgacha pratis (the Divine Providence) and see how Hashem was guiding and saving Mordechai, Esther, and every single Jew.

And then Yossi C. made the sweetest connection:
“A gem sounds like Hashem!”

Who’s hiding behind the mask?

Purim also means lottery, so we made our own classroom lottery to choose which part of the Megillah each child would get to work on..

When we read the Megillah on Purim, every time we hear Haman’s name, we make loud noise with our graggers! The idea is to make so much noise that we “erase” the name of Haman and all the evil he brought into the world.

But we didn’t stop there…

We doubled down and created special graggers that are actually tzedakah boxes! Because the best way to truly erase Haman’s name is by adding more light, by doing extra mitzvos! 

We practiced shaking our graggers every time we heard Haman’s name in the Megillah!

When “Haman” came to visit our class and told the children to bow down to him, the children knew exactly what to do! They remembered what Mordechai did, and together they answered loudly and confidently: “No, no, no! We will not bow down to you! We only bow down to Hashem!”

In the month of Adar we are meant to be extra happy! We celebrated with fun face paint!

We had so much fun dressing up this week!

We celebrate our friends birthday with a sweet tradition of making birthday cards for the birthday boy or girl. It was so heartwarming to see the children asking Moshe, whose birthday is coming up, “What’s your favorite color?”  “How do you spell your name?”

Pre-K Kria

We learned letter ל Lamed!

K Kria

We are working on our cholam sound..

Academics

We have been learning about voting and democracy. At Circle Time we read the book “President of the Jungle.”

We held a mock election to vote for the new President. Our congratulations to Sloth for being elected the new President of the jungle!

Shabbat Shalom!