Category: Learning this Week

Winter break is just around the corner! We have an exciting lineup of camp days planned for the week, and we’d love for your kiddos to join us. Camp days run from 8:30am to 5:30pm. They include a variety of trips, games, and projects. Below you can find detailed schedules for your perusal. Click here to register! Each day, we…

One of the greatest joys in my job is helping to bring Jewish text and ideas to life for our students. We’ve spent two weeks now learning the story of Ezra and the first public Torah reading. Yesterday we had the amazing opportunity to put the text into action and do our own Torah reading with targum (translation) as part of our tefilah (prayer) service.  After starting off with a few…

We had a wonderful time gathering for Shabbat dinner last week! Thank you all for everything you brought and did to make that happen. Between dinner and dessert, we had a few minutes for parents to learn and talk with each other. Our learning focused on Birkat Yeladim—the traditional Friday night ritual for blessing our children, where we bless our…

How do we remember and recreate the experiences of those who came before us? Why is that an important thing to do? Our text this week tells the story of the first public Torah reading and comes from chapter 8 of the book of Nehemiah. We looked at it in conversation with the story of the Jewish people receiving the…

Jewish History has given Bnai Yisrael (the Jewish People) our share of challenges to overcome. Even with that, Jewish wisdom is timeless and always has what to offer us in every iteration, generation, and stage of our lives. When we meet challenges though, we often adapt and invent new approaches to our inherited Jewish wisdom. The Book of Nehemiah, Chapter…

What are your top ten “commandments” for participating in community? What are the promises that should hold between any individual and the rest of the community members? Here’s what we came up with for our Makom Community Brit this year(not necessarily in order of importance): We love everyone in the best way we can. We show gratitude. We get to…

How do you respond in the face of someone else’s anger? The story of het ha’egel has a beautiful example in it of a leader (Moshe) defending the people in the face of God’s fury. God finds out that Bnei Yisrael make and pray to an idol and gets really, really angry. Moshe notices God’s anger and stops God from…

  This week we started learning the story of het ha’egel, the big mistake Bnei Yisrael made by making and worshipping a golden calf (Exodus 32, 33:1-4).  Mistakes are tricky things! It’s easy to feel upset with ourselves and others for doing the wrong thing. But do strong negative reactions provide us with the best mindset for learning and growing from our mistakes?  We examined the feelings that we have right before…

Last week, I watched a pair of siblings playing together after their homework was done. The older sibling was intentionally annoying the younger sibling, and the younger sibling responded by pushing the older one. Then we stopped to talk about it. Their reflections were interesting. Their followup was impressive.  The younger sibling was able to admit that he should have spoken up instead…

Nobody is treated better than anybody else. We make people feel loved. We treat everyone like they are family. According to your incredible, loving kiddos, that’s how we treat the people in our community.  Like family.  We definitely felt that love this past week. Beverly had the amazing opportunity to be part of the Upstart Lab, which meant spending three…

In one of the most poignant moments in Torah, the newly formed Jewish people responds as one voice when presented with a tremendous opportunity and challenge. “Moshe wrote down all the things God said. Then he took sefer habrit (the book of the covenant) and read it aloud to all the people. They said, “All that God says—na’ase venishma! (We…

What would you do if you found a lost item that belonged to your enemy?  We’re talking enemy, here, as in a “person you fight” and a “person you hate” (definitions from your kiddos!).  According to the mitzvah (law) we read this week, you have to bring the lost item back to them.  Woah.  Hard! Here’s a list of the…

Do you ever read a text, feel full of questions, and wish you had a friend there to help you answer them?  That’s what hevruta study is all about. It’s a method of digging into a text with a partner. Here are the steps of the process: Read the text. Ask questions. Offer answers. Agree or disagree and discuss.  Use…

The experience Bnai Yisrael (the Jewish people) had at Mt. Sinai was strange and confusing, and we had LOTS of fun imagining what that experience might have been like.   This is the text we studied this week:  Exodus 20:15-18  All the people saw the thunder and the lightening, the shofar, and the mountain smoking. When the people saw it, they stepped back. They said to Moshe,…

Have you ever caught yourself really pining after something that belonged to someone else? What does all of that wanting do inside us? What might it lead us to do to other people? And how can we deal with it? This week we learned the 10th and final commandment, “Don’t covet your neighbor’s belongings. Don’t want their things so badly…

What would the world look like if we successfully followed all of the aseret hadibrot? And if we followed none of them? Today we focused on #8, “Do not steal.” We delved into whether it is an easy commandment to follow, what kinds of situations make following each commandment challenging, and how our mistakes affect the people around us. We…

Are you a perfect promise keeper? Jewish tradition has some great wisdom to share with us about making and keeping big, important promises. This week we learned from your amazing kids how that wisdom plays out in their lives. On Tuesday we dove into the third commandment, don’t make a promise using God’s name unless you’re going to keep it….

We love how engaged Makom Community parents are, and we know you want to talk with your students about everything they are learning and experiencing at Makom Community! In the coming weeks, we will be studying the 10 Commandments. During the week of September 18, we are delving into the first four commandments: I am God. No idols. No empty…

In our text this week, Bnei Yisrael (the Jewish People) is gathered in the desert at the bottom of Mt. Sinai, unsure of what’s coming next on their journey after slavery. God speaks to Moshe and tells him that if Bnei Yisrael will keep the brit (two-way promise) with God, then they will be for God a “treasured possession,” a…

New students and returning students are here, and we are so excited to welcome them in and get the year going! Next week, our kindergarten students will join us, too. This year, we have a large enough enrollment in afterschool enrichment that we created two learning groups functioning in parallel. We have Boker for our Pre-K, K, and 1 students,…

Sign up today! You’ll be glad you did. https://makomcommunity.org/Fall2017 1. Make new friends in different schools and grades. 2. Enjoy a camp-like, joyful Jewish education. 3. Jewish learning that applies to everyday life! 4. Unwind after a busy day at school. 5. Build relationships with loving staff who individualize the learning experience for your child. 6. Gain support on your journey as a parent. 7….

With this week’s heat, we certainly know summer is upon us! We also know that typical summer camp schedules leave working parents with huge gaps where we are struggling to have something our children are excited to do! We have FANTASTIC camp days planned for one week in June and two weeks in August. See below for all the specifics,…

What a journey we’ve had with you and your families this year! ­We created a brit (promise) to guide us through the year, made music, enjoyed Shabbat together as families, delved into how to make the world more just, and worked to understand our own freedom. We have welcomed new friends from a variety of schools and neighborhoods, new staff…

Today, our students were AMAZING. Okay, fine. They’re always amazing. Today they shared their wisdom in especially wise ways.  We are winding down our study of the narrative of Bnai Yisrael (the Jewish people) leaving Egypt. Today, we focused on when God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.  We asked, “What can you tell me about the personality of someone with a hard heart?”  Stubborn  Meaner  Angrier …

Bnei Yisrael had trouble hearing from Moshe that they would ever get out of Egypt. Slavery was all they had known for generations, and the Torah says, “their spirits were crushed.” Thankfully, our students had relatively little in their lives to compare crushed spirits to, so we did a demonstration with two small apples.  Before the students arrived, we had taken…

Today, we studied the text where Moshe and his wife Tzipora (from Midian) name their son Gershom. We delved into the ways their son’s name reflects both Moshe and Tzipora’s life experience and family tradition. First, we asked our students to share with us some of the holidays they celebrate with their extended families: Chanukkah Passover Shabbat Christmas St. Patrick’s…

We just began our final unit of the school year—hard to believe that summer is just around the corner! We’ll spend the coming weeks studying the narrative of getting Bnei Yisrael (the Jewish people) out of Egyptian slavery. We opened our new unit by reflecting on how well our students already know the story of leaving Egypt from our services…

How does the movie Aladdin shed light on a Jewish text written by Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan? Well, they’re both thinking about how people handle power. First, our students reflected on the way Jafar (the villan) sought out limitless power in the movie. We reflected on him being too greedy and forgetting that he is responsible to people other than himself….

We continued our unit on tzedek (justice) by unpacking what barriers to self-love might be. In particular, we were looking at the idea of loving ourselves from “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”, (Leviticus 19:18). During snacktime learning, we watched a short film titled “Just Breathe ”https://youtu.be/RVA2N6tX2cg. In this film, children explain different strategies for feeling better when they are…

We continued our unit on tzedek (justice) by exploring the mitzvah (commandment) of tzedakah (charity) We dug deeper into the texts of the Talmud which sparked several conversations, ideas, and opinions about what a mitzvah  is and the importance of giving tzedakah. During snacktime learning, we explored Maimonides’ eight levels of tzedakah. We discussed how giving a little of what…