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 and, frustrated, hit a rock against God’s instructions, and the second was in the moments before his death when he climbed Har Nevo (Mt. Nebo) to give out brachot (blessings) to all the tribes of Bnei Yisrael (the Jewish people). We took a pause from this story to focus on Shavuot!
On Shavuot, Jewish people celebrate receiving the Torah/Ten Commandments on Har Sinai (Mount Sinai). We already had a cardboard mountain in our room to help us imagine Moshe’s experience climbing up Har Nevo to look out at Canaan. Our classroom Har Nevo duly shrank and became Har Sinai as we shifted our focus to Shavuot.
I love teaching the fun of all the Jewish holidays to our Garinim (K-1 grade) learners! The best day of our Shavuot exploring was what we called Slumber Party Day. There is a midrash (a commentary story) that says the night before Bnei Yisrael were going to receive the Ten Commandments, they overslept! So now there is a common custom for the night Shavuot begins every year, where many Jewish communities host a Tikkun Leil Shavuot. Literally, this translates to “repair for the night of Shavuot.” Participants stay up all night learning Torah from each other to repair for the mistake of Bnei Yisrael oversleeping, along with the additional motivation of making sure no one will oversleep and miss the reading of the Ten Commandments in services the next morning. Garinim played with this idea by turning our classroom into the coziest of slumber party vibes to do our own version of all-night learning. No one wants to actually sleep at a slumber party!
This was the setup: our cozy corner rug was in the middle of the floor, surrounded by pillows and blankets. We turned off all the big lights and lit up the room only with a string of fairy lights and a lantern in the middle of the floor. We started with aleph-bet yoga to wake our bodies up, reviewed the Ten Commandments, and then dove into our Tikkun (learning). In many communities that host a Tikkun, different people facilitate classes so we can learn from each other’s expertise on a variety of topics. After I explained the midrash and why we were doing this custom, I offered the learners a chance to teach each other things that they know! They taught each other topics from negative numbers to Minecraft. And meanwhile, everyone got to be super cozy with the blankets and the lights. We had our very own Tikkun Leil Shavuot and got to learn from each other the way many other Jewish people do when celebrating Shavuot. I hope the joy and fun of the unusual classroom setup and everyone learning from each other will help the Garinim carry the memory and understanding of Shavuot with them for a long time.
