Birkat Chaverim
This is part two of the letter we sent for the kids Cultural Exchange -Israel. You can read about the cultural exchange and part one of our letter here. Israeli mailboxes. Do your local mailboxes look like this? Things you may or may not know about Israel and Jerusalem: Both national languages, Hebrew and Arabic, are read right to left not ...
Last summer I noticed that a blogger I enjoy reading, Chasing Cheerios, was organizing a kid cultural exchange. I always thought these sounded like fun and my daughter was rather into writing at the time, so I asked to join and also passed it on to some other locals who might be interested in doing something like that. I thought I would share what we se ...
I'm happy to welcome a guest post about Voices of the Generations for Yom Hashoah from Marcia Reines Josephy, former curator and director of the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum, and longtime Holocaust educator. Disclosure: also close relative. Difficulty of Teaching Holocaust It is hard, oh so hard to teach about the Holocaust and genocide. It is hard ...
From Lag BOmer to Shavuot I will be hosting a blog series called Mitzvot Unplugged. The main theme of the series is teaching tiny tots/kids/young adults Jewish values in a creative way. I am pretty excited about this series, and about the people who have already agreed to participate in the series who range from creative bloggers to organizations to ...
Reviewing Rav Mitch Heifetz z"l and Michael Toben's HaKol Baseder Haggadah Kit has brought back memories from my adolesence, time at TVI and various Bnei Akiva functions. I was not particularly close to Rav Mitch z"l, I was a fairly introverted, quite kid in large groups (which is where I met him), but I did admire him. Rav Mitch was the rav machan ...
I had to share this idea organized by my cousin Shmuel, rabbi of Congregation Ohev Shalom, and his shul. In honor of the 100 birthday of one of his congregants, Anna Yuter, the synagogue organized a "drive" in January. What was unusual about the drive was it asked members to do an act of chesed or kindness. The synagogue then collected the acts into a b ...
This post is intended as extra material for an article I wrote with my mom for the winter CCAR journal. This is a special issue entitled "Inspiration and Opportunity: The Arts and Jewish Life." It is chock full of interesting articles. I have been slowly reading the other contributions and learning new things. Our Article is entitled: A Gift to the Com ...
I've been meaning to post this for a while. Over sukkot we did a rather fun activity. Wikimedia Israel ran a little contest to get people to submit images of Heritage sites in Israel. I've always enjoyed the wiki loves art and wiki loves monuments type of projects and I knew that my daughter enjoys taking photos. I also knew she was a bit competitive so ...
As you know we've set up a collaborative Jewish informal education pinterest board (join us!). Here is a teaser of some of the pins that have been shared that would be great for Tu (15) B'shvat: One of my favorites is the scratch art leaf (cut off here) from Art Projects for Kids. Note that some of these pins are from this site and can be found i ...
We are still playing dreidel tag. Our home made origami version did not come out so well (toddler ate it,) but we do have a few others to show. One of these(upper right corner) has been featured here before, but I still love it. I love how kids mix colors together to make such bold, bright artwork. My daughter made another one this year (lower row t ...