Remember back in June, when you had a document open asking yourself, what should each grade level learn? We are here to help with that daunting task! As part of Makom Making, where we share the best educational and operational lessons from our Makom Community Lab School, we work with Jewish educators across the country. We often hear that curriculum…
Makom Community News & Blog
Makom Community News & Blog
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August Camp Highlights!
Curious about what you can expect from Makom Community’s School’s Out Camp? This blog takes a quick look at the joy, playfulness, and community building that characterize Makom Community camp days. What are ways that we can make sure our tent includes everybody in our community? At the start of Tefilah: Prayer, Music, and Movement, during Mah Tovu, campers made…
Makom Community: A Lab School
Welcome to 5784/2023-2024 Jewish Enrichment year at Makom Community! We are so excited to welcome your whole family back to our Sansom Street Lab School and to our community! For those of you who read our writing with a fine tooth comb, you may have noticed we have been referring to our Jewish Enrichment program as a Lab School. For…
Joy in Bloom at our 2023 Summer Conference
Makom Community’s 2023 Summer Conference, entitled Jewish Placemaking: Planning for Joy, sought to explore joy through the principles of Jewish Placemaking. After two very full days of schmoozing, learning, teaching, and playing, it is safe to say that the over thirty educators who attended the conference were reminded of the joy of radical approaches to education and inspired to integrate…
Top 10 Moments of 2022-23
Now that summer is here, we wanted to take this opportunity to share our favorite moments from this past year with you. Which one is your favorite? 10. The Anafim (4th-7th grade) kiddos led the Torah service at our Family Sukkot Retreat in October. Their thought-provoking questions demonstrated how at Makom we learn from each other and from challenging the Jewish…
A Year of Learning & Building
“And let them make me a sanctuary, so I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8)”. Almost a year ago, Beverly, Gaby, and I reflected on what text we would bring to our learners for our third unit, which would also be the unit that wrapped up our school year. We ultimately decided on the big idea of “Being in…
Poetic Textploration
I chose to structure my Shavuot tikkun (text study session) through the lens of poetry because I love how poetry challenges the way we perceive things. Take Dickinson for example. Emily Dickinson wrote that “Hope is the thing with feathers”. I know that I for one didn’t think of hope as a bird, as an emotion that can take flight,…
Many Minds, Many Insights
As the year comes to an end, I have been looking back on what the Anafim learners have taught me this year. The Anafim, of course, all have their unique interests and personalities. From them, I have learned about fashion, popular culture, chemistry, and other fascinating topics. Nothing I have done with the Anafim this year illustrates just how much…
Music, Community, and the Mishkan
The Garnim kiddos (Pre-K and Kindergarten), explored text surrounding the building of the mishkan in a musical context. The kids understood the story of building the mishkan as one where many parts came together to build one whole structure. The text of Exodus has helped us understand how every member of Bnei Yisrael contributed to the building of the mishkan…
Jewish Placemaking in the Ya’ar
16 months ago I was sitting with Beverly Socher-Lerner, Executive Director & Founder of Makom Community, and they explained that there has been interest for the Makom Community model to be implemented in other communities. As a board member, I was excited, knowing the high-quality education and community-building principles Makom embraces. I saw the possibility of us impacting the field…
The Building Blocks of Community
In my Winter Break Camp blog, I wrote that there are “three ingredients vital to creating a sense of joy and belonging: connection, immersion, and agency”. In this piece I unpacked one way I used expansive choices to encourage agency and self-efficacy in Winter Break campers. Now, how does one foster agency in a program when we cannot offer such…
Educators Creating Culture
Enthusiastic! Novel. Growing. Inclusive and welcoming. Fun! Intergenerational. Spiritual. Warm. Communal. Diverse. Adaptive. Joyful! These are some of the words our Jewish Placemaking Accelerator participants used to describe their Hebrew schools and synagogues in our April seminar on Creating Culture. After brainstorming some of the ways to describe the current culture of these institutions, we looked at their respective mission…
Most of All, I Have Learned From My Students
I have the privilege of working with Makom Community’s classroom educators, Makom lab school students, and Jewish educators from all over the country. As Makom Community grows, I get to share my love of Jewish wisdom and Jewish Placemaking not only with children and teachers in our Lab School, but also bring the tools of Jewish Placemaking to educators all…
What’s the Big Idea?
It is no secret that at Makom Community, we like to do things big, loudly, and with a lot of excitement. One cause for such fanfare? The starting of a new unit- a theme that we will spend the next several weeks exploring through the texts we study and, for Nitzanim (2nd-4th graders), our project-based-learning (PBL) projects. Nitzanim at both…
Seeing Ourselves in Our Stories
This past month at Makom Community, we have been dedicating a lot of time to learning about and reading Megillat Esther. Megillat Esther is the text that tells us the story of Purim; a story that many of you may be familiar with. In it, King Achashverosh, the king of Persia, sends his wife away for disobeying him and invites…
Adar: When Kids Inspire Joy
During the Hebrew month of Adar, the month where Purim falls, we’re commanded to increase our joy. As a Jew and an educator, I’ve always struggled with this commandment. Maybe it is that I’ve outgrown my love of dressing up in costume, so Purim doesn’t have the same glitz and glam that it once did. Still, as a Jewish educator,…
Bringing Jewish Placemaking to a Learning Space Near You
Over the last few years, teaching has demanded lots of creativity and flexibility from educators. Participants in our recent Jewish Placemaking Accelerators have bounced around to different classrooms inside their respective synagogues, outside their respective synagogues, and online. We started our December seminar together by brainstorming some challenges and opportunities presented by four different learning spaces: indoors, outdoors, shared, and…
Pharoah’s Fate: An Anafim Debate
“I am more confused than I was before we started talking about this.” These words from an Anafim (4th-7th graders) learner brought a huge smile to my face. We were engaged in a debate about whether Pharaoh could be judged guilty of not letting Bnei Yisrael (the Children of Israel) go free from their bondage in Egypt. The three learners…
Count on Me: Trust in Shorashim
As we deepen our understanding of praise in this unit, the Shorashim (1st-2nd grade) have come to know that trust is a foundational principle of giving and receiving praise. To explore this idea, we practiced trust with those in our own classroom through a blindfolded group exercise. Through this experience, we realized just how complex and fragile trust is, even…
Moving Toward Mastery with Nitzanim
How do we give kids a sense of ownership and meaning of the tefilot (prayers) we chant in Hebrew each day? To some kids, learning Hebrew at Makom is their first experience with the challenges of language learning and the practice of engaging in tefilot is one they have been introduced to for the first time in our program. Once…
Talking to God
A few weeks ago, the Garinim (preK and K kiddos) in Center City unpacked what tefilah (prayer) is for. Why do we do it? What kinds of conversations are we hoping to have through it? Here’s the list we came up with: Praise (wow!) Gratitude (thank you) Request (help, please!) Creating connection, conversation, and community The main tefilah that sets…
Our Talent is Praise
What an amazing way to jump back into Makom Community learning to start 2023! The Garinim (PreK and K learners) and Shorashim (1st and 2nd graders) in Center City spent two afternoons this week preparing for and performing in a talent show. We couldn’t be more proud of how it went! We prepared to showcase our talents. Kiddos spent the…
A Recipe for Joy and Belonging
I believe there are three ingredients vital to creating a sense of joy and belonging: connection, immersion, and agency. I define these three concepts as follows. Connection: the feeling that you belong, that you are part of a larger whole, are loved, and that you have the tools to deepen your relationships with others. Immersion: the feeling of losing yourself…
Unit One: Reflections
How might having a relationship with our ancestors helps us understand where we’ve come from to know where we’re going? This was the question that Makom Community explored for our first unit of the 22-23 school year. Our unit, Avot V’imahot (ancestors) gave us the opportunity to reflect on both ancestors and family that we know today, as well as…
Learning from Our Learners
Every educator has a different reason for being passionate about working with children. However, the core of that drive is almost always the kids themselves. In my case, I am drawn to this work because I’ve always found that there are many days where I am not the one teaching. In many instances, the kids teach me and open my…
Anafim: Becoming Textplorers
What can we learn from the relationship between Moshe and God? This is the question that our Anafim (5th-7th grade) students have been mulling over since the beginning of the year. In the texts we have been discussing, Moshe asks God for Their help in leading the Jewish people. He also asks God to show him Their splendor, so that…
Voting and Living Like Our Children are Watching…Because They are!
Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting to Jewish professionals running family camps all over the United States at a gathering of the Foundation for Jewish Camp. I pushed them on what it means to teach. We were working to expand our understanding of teaching to refer not just to the explicit teaching of knowledge, but the way that we…
Makom Making: A Communal Practice
If you have read my previous blog post, you know that Makom Community fills a special place in my heart. My childhood lacked a community like that which Makom provides. I see the way our kiddos interact with their grownups, their educators, the world at large, and I can’t help but stand in awe. It is such an honor to…
Garinim: Budding Community
Welcome back to Jewish Enrichment! We’re so thrilled to be back learning and playing every afternoon with your wise and wonderful kiddos. These first two weeks of the year were chock full of ice breaker games, welcoming back old friends, forming new connections, and settling back into the routines of Jewish Enrichment. Here are some highlights from our youngest learners,…
Opportunities for a Mindful Rosh Hashanah
A new year can elicit a lot of feelings. Our children are getting older. Our parents and loved ones are getting older. We are still navigating living through a pandemic in our own ways. Fortunately, the rhythms of the Jewish calendar invite us into this season to reflect, renew, and encounter the new. I want to offer a few opportunities…