What's Jewish About Baseball?

This morning much to the delight of some baseball fans in her class brought in Jewish Major League Baseball Cards!

Tishrei Chagim Resource

If you go to the website www.cajestl.org and click on Teacher Resources there is a Tisherei Picture Book that uses the text from Brown Bear Brown Bear using the holiday symbols. I plan to use some of the text and take photographs of the children in our school holding the real objects and then adding the Hebrew as well.

I am always looking for new ideas for the fall chagim and this could be a great addition to the class library and a way to "revisit" the chagim later in the year.


One other resource I found recently was a book called My First Book of Israel by Ann D. Koffsky (see photo. So sorry one of them is upside down, I haven't quite figured out how to fix that yet! I'm working on it.

The Sweet Smell of Havdalah

This morning for the first time ever we started our week with a very brief Havdalah "get together", right in the hallway outside my office. It was such a great start to the week!

One of our teachers over heard Mack and Jack, two children in our four-year-old class during lunch on Friday "I love Shabbat, don't you!" They are sitting at a table with a white tablecloth they decorated to be used only on Shabbat.

This morning as the children entered the Sanctuary they walked underneath a huge Tallit made by the 4's class last year. It is amazing to watch their faces light up as they know something special is about to happen. We have also started to play Shabbat music
as the children and parents leave on Friday afternoons. Everyone loves it including the office staff.

Last year we had a community Shabbat that included the candlelighting, kiddush and hamotzi.
We found that the children were not learning the brachot because the environment was too chaotic so we have switched back to candlelighting in individual classrooms with children taking turns each week to lead the brachot with parents as invited guest. We still have a community Shabbat Sing which is led by the Rabbi and Cantor.

Join us on our journey through Israel all year long!

As I walked past one of our three-year-old classrooms this morning the first vision I saw was children playing in the sand table with the Israeli flag in the background. This year it is our goal

to make connections to Israel in concrete and meaningful ways everyday. In April when we celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut, our children will have had many opportunities to "build a relationship with Israel". Follow our blog to see how we do this! Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

In the photograph above, the bulletin board is only several inches off the floor and includes a large map of Israel. As we travel around the children will identify all the places they visit. Tomorrow is our first meeting with Gal, our young emmissary from Israel and so the journey begins!