We can’t wait to kick off our first week with our students! Sarah and I have been busily preparing for what seems like forever, and we’re so ready to see your kids’ smiling faces and learn with them!
Here’s a sneak preview of how we’ll start off the year:
Getting to Know You
Each day during our first two weeks will include some dedicated time for getting to know each other. We’ll play games together, be silly, enjoy the warm weather, and begin working as a team.
Intentionally Being Part of a Community
We’re kicking off this school year studying the narrative from Exodus where Bnai Yisrael (the Jewish people) build a mishkan (portable gathering place) for themselves in the desert. Moses asks everyone to contribute something, and people contribute SO MUCH that he had to ask them to stop.
Working from that model, we’ll play games like shrinking ship, where the students are all challenged to work together on a single task in a progressively smaller and smaller space. We’ll try this a number of different ways and assess which kinds of challenges were easier with more space or less space or with more people or fewer people. This will help our students think about times that it is best to work independently, with one person, or with lots of people. From there, we will talk about how to communicate our preferences around who we are working with on what kinds of activities. We are building important groundwork for a whole year of child-led learning and moderating what they need after a full day at school!
Catching Up
Whether we knew each other before the summer or not, we have catching up to do! Sharing about our experiences over the summer will help us know what is important to each other and what kinds of projects or games our students might learn from best. We can’t wait to get to know you and get to know how you’ve grown.
Creating Our Space
Though Sarah and I have been hard at work setting up our space all summer, our students play an important role in making the space theirs, too. What Sarah and I have set up on the walls so far are only frames for their work and their upcoming projects. In the first week, we’ll kick off that process by decorating name signs for a wall mural and for our Tfilah (Prayer, music, and movement) space in two different media.
Ringing in Shabbat!
Our students will get a crash course in challah braiding (unless they are already experts) and learn Shabbat songs to share with their families when they arrive at 5:30pm on Friday to celebrate Shabbat with us. Parents will get to learn alongside their children as we celebrate Shabbat together. I will get to teach our parents a bit about the generosity of building the mishkan (portable gathering place) and ask them to reflect on how they understand generosity in their own family and share that with their children. And we’ll share freshly baked challah and grape juice and send each family home with freshly baked challah, too.
Want to join us?
Though our enrollment has more than doubled since last year, we still have a few spots available! You can sign up to join us on a flexible schedule by clicking this link: www.makomcommunity.org/enrollment2015