Category: Learning this Week

Why is it so hard to say “I’m sorry”? What makes a good apology? Should we apologize when we don’t mean it? This week the Erev kids (grades 3-5) took a look at the Jonah story and talked it out! In the story, God tells Jonah to warn the city of Ninveh that God is going to destroy them because they were wicked.  Jonah doesn’t want to, he runs away, things…

Tekiyaaaa! That’s the sound of a shofar, a special horn that we blow in the weeks leading up to and during the High Holidays. Like the Shema, a shofar asks us to wake up and pay attention.  We started off snacktime learning each day this week by blowing the shofar. Then we unpacked what the shofar is asking us to pay attention to:   Everything   Reading the torah   The rabbi  What about ourselves…

Hey you! Shema! Listen up! Did we get your attention? Good! This week we have been talking about listening: how we do it, why we do it, and the factors that make listening a challenge at times. We did all this exploring in the context of the first line of Shema, a central piece of Jewish prayer. Every year at…

What’s new at Makom Community?  We have doubled the size of our space, the number of bean bag chairs, and the glitter supply. The erev kiddos (grades 3-5) are enjoying their own space for snacktime learning and shulchanot avodah (project centers) up on the third floor. The boker kids (grades pre-K-2) are settling in downstairs. Towards the end of our…

Do you remember all of the amazing learning we did last year? What about all the brilliant, quotable ideas your kiddos shared? Check out this recap highlighting some of my favorite moments, and get stoked to start it all again in just over a week! Our first curriculum unit last year was about Bnei Yisrael’s (the Jewish people) experience receiving…

https://makomcommunity.org/fall2018 They’ll LOVE it.  New friends in different schools and grades.  Fresh challah every Friday!  Playful, joyful Jewish education.  A community of supportive parents for you.  Staff who loves your child and works with them individually.  Pickup from your child’s elementary school five days a week.  Camp days when school is closed for snow days, conferences, or professional development.  Family…

Local summer camps are going to wrap up well before school is back in session. We have FANTASTIC camp days planned for the third week in August. See below for all the specifics and SIGN UP TODAY! All camps are $70/day plus any additional field trip fees. Or sign up for a full week, $405 including all field trip costs. www.makomcommunity.org/camps Also, remember…

Summer is upon us! We have FANTASTIC camp days planned for two weeks in June. See below for all the specifics and SIGN UP TODAY! All camps are $70/day plus any additional field trip fees. Or sign up for a full week, $405 including all field trip costs. www.makomcommunity.org/camps Also, remember to sign up soon to make sure your kiddos get their…

What are the big takeaways we can glean from this whirlwind unit on gender in Torah? We went back and spent a day on each of three texts to parse out what gender models those stories present. I couldn’t choose just one day’s conversation to write a post about, so you’re stuck an extra-long record of your children’s insight and…

Does God have a gender? If so, what is it? This week we reexamined three familiar texts with an eye towards what God was doing, how we would describe God in those situations, and whether those actions and descriptions seem more masculine, more feminine, or both/neither. The texts we used for this process were from the leaving Egypt story—when God…

What are things you’ve been told you should or shouldn’t do because of your gender? This week at Makom Community we used the story of Leah and Rachel marrying Yaakov to help us unpack some gender role expectations, both in Torah text and in our own lives. During shulchanot avodah (learning centers), we looked at plot points from the story…

What are things you’ve been told you should or shouldn’t do because of your gender? This week at Makom Community we used the story of Leah and Rachel marrying Yaakov to help us unpack some gender role expectations, both in Torah text and in our own lives. During shulchanot avodah (learning centers), we looked at plot points from the story…

We came into this fourth unit with a whole slew of excellent questions that our inquisitive students have been wondering about all year. Here’s a sampling:   Who’s telling the story?  Who do they think is listening?  Where are the women in the stories?  Why don’t we hear what they say, think, and feel?  How do all of these fathers, brothers, and…

Yishar koach—well done, Erev friends! I’m so excited to get to tell you all about the excellent projects our 2nd through 5th graders created to help us review the Yosef story we’ve been learning for the past few months. They are an amazing, creative bunch! Here are the four different activities they came up with. Two students worked together to…

Would you give up your favorite spot on the couch for a guest? In our text this week, all of Yosef’s brothers return to Egypt to get more food, including the youngest and new favorite Binyamin. When Yosef sees them approaching, he tells his servant to invite them over for lunch. The servant gives the brothers water to wash their…

When famine hits the whole region of Canaan, Yaakov sends 10 of his sons down to Egypt where he’s heard there is food. Little do they realize that their long-lost brother Yosef oversees distributing rations. Yosef recognizes his brothers and starts playing tricks on them. He accuses them of being spies trying to see the land in its vulnerable state….

Makom Community Teachers 2018-2019 2 Part-Time Positions ~20 hours/week Beginning May 29, 2018 OR August 15, 2018 Note: One of these positions is short-term parental leave coverage through September 2018, and the other is a school year position through June 2019.   This may be the position for you, if you meet the requirements below and you… • Want to…

At Makom Community, we pride ourselves on the ways we all take care of each other. The brit (two-way promise) that we created at the beginning of the school year exemplifies how we are all dedicated to helping everyone in our community feel safe, loved, and able to learn and grow together. We focused in on a moment in our text this week to talk a little more…

What a hilarious snow day we had! By the time it was snowing enough to be fun to play outside, the visibility wasn’t great, and the falling snow was icy. So we had a short snow walk (not quite two blocks) to check out the weather, and hunkered down inside the rest of the day. One of the major highlights…

Happy Purim! This week we practiced our commentary skills on the Purim story. Your creative and inquisitive kiddos came up with SO MANY excellent questions and inventive answers (more than twice as many as written in this post)! We are so impressed and proud. Check out your kiddos’ brilliance (and their goofy faces enjoying our Purim celebrations) below.    …

What do you think are reasonable expectations for an average sibling relationship? At first glance, the relationships Yosef has with his brothers don’t seem like very good examples for us. But looking more closely, we can learn some interesting things. At this point in our story (Genesis 37: 18-28), Yosef has found his brothers grazing their flocks of sheep. As…

This week we’ve been learning about commentary. Commentary, as one of our students put it, is the story of what you think about a (typically missing) detail in a text. We learned some commentary written by a well-known, medieval, French rabbi named Rashi. Looking at his work allowed us gain a different perspective and a deeper understanding of our text….

This week, we began studying the story of Yosef and his amazing, technicolor dream coat. It’s often easy to feel highly critical of our families, especially as we’re all juggling so much and want to be phenomenal parents. I want to suggest that Yosef’s family offers an interesting lens for thinking about how families function together (or don’t) that maybe…

The enthusiasm for Ivrit (Hebrew) learning over this past week has been so high that we decided to keep our Shulchanot Avodah (learning centers) available through Friday. Our students could not get enough of letter identifying, vocabulary learning, trope singing, and text translation. It helped to have a little extra motivation in the form of a Bingo board. Every time…

As usual, your brilliant kiddos blew us away this week. Over the past few days, I’ve watched the Boker (pre-K—1) students pick up the basic mechanics of Hebrew reading and all the Hebrew vowels. Beverly challenged the Erev (2—5) students to all read and sing at least two words of text with trope, and every single one of them did….

What do we know about God? The answer is a LOT of things, from a LOT of different stories, which are at times repetitive, comforting, contradictory, and upsetting. Over the past week, we examined half a dozen stories from Jewish text and pulled out what God is doing, how God is treating Bnei Yisrael (the Jewish people), and what we…

When I share with other Jewish educators what we teach our students on weeks like this one, they are either jealous or amazed that we take on theology in such a complicated way with such young students. But at the end of the day, this is child-led learning! And your children have asked a lot of questions about God. So…

Bnei Yisrael (the Jewish People) have finally made it to Israel and life is good! After centuries of slavery and decades of wandering in the desert, they have a home where there’s plenty of water and food and space. They settle in and get comfy. And in their comfort, Bnei Yisrael forgets the brit (two-way promise) that they made with…

Is God present in our lives? How can we tell? This week we continued studying the summary of Jewish History that the Levi’im (Levites) recounted during the first Yom Kippur celebration. We read the part of the story where Bnei Yisral (the Jewish people) were wandering in the desert and counting on God for food and water. This is a…

This week, one of the texts we focused on together was the Levi’im (Levites) re-telling the whole history (as they see it) of the Jewish People. What they highlight and don’t is fascinating all by itself. One piece they highlight is the Jewish People’s inability to be grateful for how bountifully God provided for them while they are wandering in…