Last week, we completed the final stretch of our Pesach (Passover) unit. We did Bedikat Chametz (checking for bread products) by playing hide and seek games with chametz (bread products). And we did Biyur Chametz by destroying all the chametz. We closed out our week with a camp day about the leaving Egypt story. Read on to get the details!
We had lots of fun hiding chametz around Makom Community. One day our older and younger students hid chametz for each other.
For Biyur Chametz we took the kiddos down to the Schuylkill River. We threw our chametz into the river and set intentions about any unhelpful behaviors that we don’t want to bring with us into our lives as free people.
We also came up with as many ways to destroy chametz as we could.
We shredded, stepped on, burnt, buried, trashed, soaked, flushed, threw footballs at, and even made art out of our chametz.
We closed out our week with a camp day all about the leaving Egypt story. One of the mitzvot (commandments) of Pesach is to talk about leaving Egypt as though we ourselves were all personally slaves in Egypt. We took that literally by playing a homemade role-playing game where we escaped Egypt! Kiddos had to show what they knew about Haggadah in order to succeed in their escape efforts. For example, when the Hebrews cried out to God for help, they had to list all of the plagues in order for God to agree to send them down. They had to complete physical tasks like jumping jacks and pushups in order to show that they were physically ready to leave Egypt. The final escape out of Egypt was a round of a Makom Community favorite: The Running And Screaming Game.
Stay tuned next week to hear all about our new unit!