We are a program that we proudly call Makom Community, as we are a community of learners, families, and educators who all work together to co-create a space that we love to be in. We all can easily define what a community is, but what exactly is a makom? This is the question we focused on for our last research…
Makom Community News & Blog
Makom Community News & Blog
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What Place Would You Make?
Our last research question for this school year was: “Can learners define the word ‘makom‘ in a personally meaningful way?” And we approached the structure of our research and data collection in a varied approach from the rest of the year. We answered the question not only by observing the collective learning, but we also directly asked the learners. Over…
Teaching to Care for Multiple Iterations of Ourselves
Anafim (5th-7th grade) wrapped up this school year with a unit called Sacred Choices, considering how Jewish wisdom can be a part of the conversation about our bodies and sexualities and what kinds of choices Jewish wisdom might guide us towards making in those areas. We started by exploring the creation of the first human being, Adam, made in b’tzelem…
Slumber Party, Anyone?
Teaching through fun and joy is the best way to have a lesson be remembered! Our curriculum unit is currently about brachah (blessing) and reflecting on how we can choose brachah at challenging or transitional moments in our lives. We’ve been comparing two pivotal moments near the end of Moshe’s life. The first was when he failed to choose brachah…
What is Love? Father Please Tell Me!
Parents, educators, Romans, and countrymen, how do the children under our care see us? Do they notice all of the effort and care we put into their well-being and education? How well do they really know us? In Anafim (5th-7th grade), we put these questions to the test. The current curriculum that Anafim has been exploring is Sacred Choices. This…
Perspectives and Places
Over the last few weeks, our Makom team has been asking, “How can multimodal approaches invite perspective-taking between learners and characters in text, and between learners and their peers?” Being able to view a situation from another person’s point of view to understand their thoughts, feelings, and motivations is a vital empathy-building skill. We already know our learners to be…
Emojis: A Helpful Access Point for Developing Compassion for Others and Ourselves
You’ve probably heard the idiom, “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” but what about walking around with an emoji on your face that describes how someone else is feeling? Before you can take that step of walking around and trying to understand someone else’s experience, it’s important to be able to accurately identify what they’re feeling in the first…
Gimme Your Money!
What better way to teach a lesson about sharing resources with everyone who needs them than by giving my Garinim (k-1st grade) learners little coins and letting them decide which organizations they would want to help? The goal of my lesson for this day was to explore the tension between the common instinct to take care of people who are…
What Does Soccer Have to Do With Shabbat?
Over the course of the past few weeks, the “other duties as needed” section of my job description at Makom has expanded to include the following: soccer-ball-blower-upper, World Cup-playlist-creator, and amateur agility course builder. Reader, you may be wondering: what does listening to World Cup music, kicking around a soccer ball, and running through kid-created obstacle courses have to do…
What Do a Teahouse & Purim Have in Common?
What do a teahouse and the story of Purim have in common? I had no idea until I walked into the Nitzanim (3rd-4th grade) classroom after Beverly, our Executive Director and Founder, transformed it into a makeshift teahouse. Why did they do this, and what does it have to do with Purim? As a Jewish Placemaking Resident, I was excited…
Well-Resourced for Winter and Every Season!
Winter is a challenging time in learning environments! Holiday schedules and weather-related disruptions all interrupt routines and affect learners’ readiness to engage. Supporting children in becoming – and remaining – regulated enough to learn is a challenge! At Makom Community, we place particular emphasis on meeting learners where they are and making learning accessible. Since regulation challenges often intensify during…
Tefilah (Prayer) is for Our Feelings
Tefilah, the practice of Jewish prayer, offers us a number of important opportunities and benefits. We can enjoy the healing, regulatory, and joyful experience of participating in communal singing. We can use tefilah as an avenue for exploring our personal theologies and understandings of God in relation to the Jewish ideas conveyed in the liturgy. Tefilah can also act as…
Looking for Helpers & Being the Helpers
A resource for following up on the ICE activity in Minneapolis, MN, in early 2026 A message from Beverly Socher-Lerner, Executive Director & Founder of Makom Community: Dear Makom Community Grownups, Thank you to those who reached out to ask for support in how to talk to your kids about what’s going on in Minneapolis and are concerned about what…
Ritual to Regulate
A research blog by: Ari Morton, Makom Making Project Manager, and Nancy Gorosh, Educator & Research Assistant On any afternoon at 4:00 PM, feelings can come quickly and powerfully, especially to our younger learners still very much building skills to manage those feelings. Being in community together presents many opportunities to support our young people in building skills for emotional…
Tropes of Jewish Wisdom
This past January, for the first time, Makom Community hosted a Saturday Shabbaton specifically for our Anafim (5th-7th grade) learners. It was an all-day program that began with a kid-led Torah service in the morning, and ended nearly twelve hours later, after we concluded Shabbat with Havdalah (the ceremony separating Shabbat from the rest of the week), followed by more…
Show Me Your Hands!
As we were getting ready to start our second unit, I knew we were also getting ready for me to start our second research intervention for the year. My task was to find regulation tools that Garinim (k-1st grade) would benefit from. As it was, the learners would enter our classroom for TEXTploration already a little bit wiggly after Tefillah…
Building Community One Light at a Time
What a delight to have a full week of Chanukah celebrations together as a community! We really missed it last year when Chanukah fell fully during winter break, and we didn’t have an opportunity to light candles, sing, play dreidel, and eat latkes with our learners and their families. We were particularly excited to return to the Center City Kehillah’s…
Quest for Lech Lecha
As Anafim (5th-7th grade) trickled into the building for class one afternoon during our trope-intensive week, the door handle to the classroom wouldn’t turn. Learners began peeking into the classroom window, scanning whatever of the room they could see to determine a cause. One kiddo announced, “I see a piece of paper on the table!” which was followed by an…
2025-2026 Quarterly Research Update
We began this year with a question: “How might an educator regularly build connections between text learning and interpersonal relationship building?” We answered this by tracking five areas of social and emotional skills – self-awareness, self-management, relationship skills, responsible decision-making, and social awareness – to notice in our learners. We hypothesized that our older learners would demonstrate more social awareness,…
Why We Love Family Shabbat Celebrations
Is it Friday yet? The days are long. The weeks are short. Our to-do lists as parents always grow faster than we can address them. And what we wouldn’t give for a little more quality time with our kids! We blink, and they’re so much older, so much more independent, and we just want to treasure every moment… if we…
Finding Harmony in Diverse Community
Over the past several weeks, Nitzanim (3rd-4th grade) has been immersed in the story of Migdal Bavel (the Tower of Babel). We’ve been analyzing everyone’s role in the story and unpacking various interpretations from both traditional commentators and modern commentators. We also identified themes and lessons we can take from the text and added to the long-established chain of interpreters…
What the Schach?
How can we teach kiddos in Garinim (K-1st grade) and Shorashim (1st-2nd grade) about the beautiful holiday of Sukkot through the eyes of our unit on Migdal Bavel (the Tower of Babel)? I found that the best and most fun way was to compare and contrast our lived realities as humans in Philadelphia in 2025 with the lives of the…
A Curious Start to the Year
We start every year at Makom with curiosity. This year, we’re shaping that curiosity through action research. In this iterative process, we start by asking questions, informed by Makom Community’s pedagogy of Jewish Placemaking. Our action research, like our pedagogy, is rooted in Makom Community’s goals and success criteria for Jewish Enrichment. Many of these goals pertain to learners’ individual…
The Magic of Continuing Communities
There’s something deliciously magical about a new school year, especially with a combination of new and returning learners. Like any ongoing community, Makom invites care as we welcome new and returning kiddos and families, as well as thoughtfulness about how we can better live up to our own ideals in this new year. We are starting out the school year…
Ending the Year in Joyful Community
Phew—we made it! Can you believe it’s already June, another school year behind us, and another summer ahead? The Garinim (K-1st graders), Shorashim (1st-2nd graders), and Nitzanim (3rd-4th graders) wrapped up this school year with a unit on Women’s Voices in Torah. It was clear to us as educators, and very quickly also clear to our kiddos, that women’s voices…
Vlogs: Video Reflections on Learning
Fostering Belonging & Self-Knowledge by Ash Fisher-Tannenbaum: A reflection on using learner curiosity and interests to inspire curriculum design. Head Teacher & Teen Educator, Ash Fisher-Tannenbaum, explains how this avenue invites learners to reflect, meditate, and stay engaged in the vlog linked below. A Child-Led Purim Celebration by Gaby Marantz: A reflection on this year’s open house Purim carnival, which…
Taking What You Need, Giving What You Have
Our last Anafim (5-7 grade) unit of the year has us studying the shmittah and yovel years in the context of balancing rest and productivity. In my opinion, finding and maintaining this balance is essential for everyone—kids and adults alike. In fact, the Anafim learners may be encountering this need for balance for the first time now they are at…
Putting on Our Commentary Hats
“Point to somebody who gets to come up with their own commentary about the Torah,” said Ash. The Garinim (k-1 grade) learners give us bewildered stares as Ash and I point at ourselves. Then we point at two children. Then two more. Our learners giggle as we all start pointing at each other– “You get to make commentary! And you!…
A Year-In-Review
“I’ve loved every moment of success I’ve been able to witness our educators lead for our kids: kids asking super on-point questions, sharing inspiring insights, supporting each other in the learning, creating poignant artistic reflections relating text to their lives, etc. The educator team works exceptionally hard to make moments like that happen, and I love it every time I…
Creating Opportunities for Agency
A few months ago, I posted a vlog about how the Nitzanim (3rd and 4th graders) were crying out for agency in the classroom, as well as my attempts to balance giving them that agency while still meeting our learning goals. As we near both the culmination of this project (the development of a classroom student-led leadership structure) and the…