Birkat Chaverim
I wanted to show some of the easy and fun Hanukkah crafts from gan, that my daughter brought home this year and last year. But I am going to start with a project which was supposed to make it to gan but didn't quite work out. Maybe we'll redo it on a smaller scale. Plastic Bag Draidel Basically I cut out a draidel from a plastic bag and ironed it on m ...
![Stela of ‘Kharser’. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Charles E. Wilbour Archival Collection [9.4.004]](https://birkatchaverim.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/steel-famine.jpg "stela 7 year famine Egypt")
A few weeks ago I linked to a few posts from the Brooklyn museum about papyrus because of a parsha connection. This week there is another one. In Parshat Miketz there's the story of Pharoh's dreams and the seven year famine.The Brooklyn museum has a stela which talks of a seven year famine in Egypt. Although it seems that the stela is from a later perio ...
We have two new Hanukkah bencher covers. On facebook I showed the blue one, which is very closely related to the Maoz Tzur book in the shop. This is an attempt to try some other colors. I very rarely use red. Not sure how I like it yet but if anyone has any suggestions for new color combinations, I'm happy to hear them. I find that many many people ask ...
In honor of Hanukkah I wanted to post a picture that I took a while back of the Menorah which sits on top of the old Bezalel building in Jerusalem. I can't remember if its the original menorah or not (I seem to recall that at some point they took it down and it was in an exhibition. I assume this is the original.) There's a cool picture from 1913 of the ...
Now that its solidly Kislev Hanukkah is just around the corner. As you can see we've started with a simple craft- decorating wooden dreidel bases. I love how the girls did them and I have to say they were a huge hit with the three year old crowd. They are pretty common here and not expensive (you can be in touch if you are looking for them.) This is a lovely clay hanukkah lamp project in the shape of buildings. I wanted to add some more educational type stuff ...
Not sure if garland is the right word, perhaps hanging is better. In any case this is extremely simple to do and we like it because we like to reuse our decorations from year to year and sometimes it rains. One solution we have for that is laminating pictures but hanging things often get a little worse for wear. However, felt holds up fairly well in ...
We are just about at that time of year when we add back the prayer for rain to the amidah prayer and water is always a hot topic with regard to Israel so I wanted to talk about something completely different, and perhaps useful to some Bar/Bat Mitzvah child interested in doing a project related to water. In the 90's there was a research study which i ...
I thought making slippers or shoes for Yom Kippur would be a fun project to help teach about the things you don't do on on this holiday. I have several posts of shoe construction on the site which we did for bears and dolls, but which can be adapted for children. Viking style shoes and slippers: This post has links to a tutorial for kid size viking s ...
Wishing you and your family a happy, healthy and meaningful new year! Its a bit late for Rosh Hashana crafts, but, as you can see above, we made Pomegranates which are equally good for Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot. They're made out of styrofoam balls, glue, glitter, feathers or pipecleaners, and plastic pins. After Rosh Hashana we'll add a ribbon to h ...
We have a number of projects on the Birkat Chaverim website that would be great for Shavuot. Shavuot craft ideas tend to focus around flowers and dairy projects as well as things that have to do with mount Sinai and the Torah. Below we have an assortment related to those topics. Some flower ideas from previous posts: Felt, nylon and paper flowers ...