In the final week of Jewish Enrichment before Winter Break, Garinim (PreK-1st grade) took a closer look at the text of Nehemiah which recounts the first time Torah was ever read in public. The kids began the unit by dissecting the importance of Bnei Yisrael being able to hear and understand the Torah for the first time in community with…
Makom Community News & Blog
Makom Community News & Blog
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The Cornerstone of Non-Violent Communication
For the first time since designing our Makom Making Accelerator, we welcomed three Philadelphia-based Education Directors into our Lab School, to foster continued relationships with other education directors who are doing the holy work of Jewish education and engagement of Jewish families. We created a professional development experience for the directors of this year’s Jewish Placemaking Accelerator centered around observing…
Choosing Blessing & Connectedness in Challenging Times
Last Monday morning, Terri, Amanda, and I arrived to Makom to see our windows defaced. It was gut-wrenching to arrive at a place that is holy to us and see someone else’s anger and frustration placed on our windows in spray paint. Later in the day, one of our first graders responded in such a deeply empathetic, Makom way when…
Cross-Age Teaching & Learning
At Makom, we know that learning extends beyond the kvutzah (age cohort group), and much of our programming, such as Family Shabbat and our Showcases, are dedicated to just this. We aim to enable our learners to teach their families the rituals and values they experience at Makom so that they can choose what they want to bring to their…
Exploring Autonomy: A Toldot Text Study
If we take the time to reflect on it, we can all remember a time in our lives when we felt a lack of autonomy. I might go as far as to argue that adolescence is the period in our lives where we are most aware of this absence. With this in mind, I sought to explore the concept of…
Reflecting on Rest
A few weeks ago, we delved into an excitingly familiar text for the Nitzanim (3rd-4th graders): the creation of Shabbat (Genesis 2:1-3). This is the same text we sing at the beginning of Friday night kiddush (blessing over wine/grape juice), which many Nitzanim kiddos are working on in Tefilah mastery. At this moment in the text, God stops creating the…
Building New Traditions
In this unit, our learners have been exploring all aspects of creation. After many exciting weeks of diving into the creation story through discussion, building, and art, we arrived at the study of Shabbat- God’s time to rest. To begin our discussion of Shabbat, our class worked together to build a fort out of the chairs and pillows that we…
Immersing Jewish Holidays & Responding to The World
“Who wants to shake the lulav?” This wasn’t a man wearing tzitzit and a black suit on a street corner – – it was one of our Garinim (pre-K to 1st grader) learners. He was inviting his classmates to step out from their usual options of Shulchanot Avodah (project center) about Bereshit (the creation story) to participate in this special…
Talking to Kiddos about News in Israel
We had such an incredibly joyful time preparing for Simchat Torah last week at Makom Community. We were dancing, singing, and asking questions about Torah across ages and schools. It was a beautiful snapshot of how we engage with Torah at Makom. And then over the weekend we got such deeply upsetting news about war in Israel. As parents, there…
Betzelem Garinim
The Garinim (PreK-1st grade) entered week 4 of Textploration at Makom with an eager mind. We’ve been tackling the text of Bereshit 1, exploring the diversity of what God created on days one through six. God separated light from darkness, sea from land, created plants and fruits, sun and moon, the stars, and of course, the animals – but what…
The Roadblock of Curriculum
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…
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…