The Parsha Bag

Hello! We have been out of town visiting family and so Ima's classroom has been on break, but my husband and I thought this would be a good time to share the concept of a Parsha Bag.

Every Shabbos my husband Elie, along with our three year old M prepares a bag of "schtick" that represents different aspects of the Parsha, usually a bunch of different toys, chatchkes, random items around the house. This is generally the highlight of our Shabbos meal, and an excellent way to keep our daughter and guests entertained as well as educated in a fun way. Elie holds up each item, asks my daughter to identify them, and then asks (her or people around the table), "Why is ________ in the Parsha?!" And then hopefully someone, or Elie, explains in a way that M (and everyone else) can more or less understand. We'll give you a sample Parsha bag, see if you can come up with the answers.

This past week's Parsha was Parshas Vaykhel, which involved a lot about the Mishkan and a little about Shabbos.

Items in our Parsha bag:

A Firetruck

King Midas and the Golden Touch (book)

Gemstone-jewelry

Silver Jewelery

Cinnamon

A Sheep

Leather Baseball glove

Red block

Turquoise Frisbee

Purple Block

Piece of Wood

Ok I'll give you some space to think of the answers (don't look!!)- let me know how many you got! Answers are at the bottom:

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Answers:

Fire truck: We are not allowed to light a fire on Shabbos

King Midas: Gold used for the Mishkan and it's vessels

Gemstone-jewelry: Avnei Shoham (precious stones) for the Choshen and the Efod.

Silver Jewelery: Used for building the sockets of the Mishkan

Cinnamon: B'samim for the anointing oil and Ketores

A Sheep: Wool for curtains of the Mishkan, as well as a sheep for korbanos

Leather Baseball glove: Animal skins used in cover for Mishkan

Red block: Scarlet wool used for curtains, also Representing the "orot eilim me'odamim"= red ram's skins- the cover for the Mishkan

Turquoise Frisbee: Turqoise wool used for curtains

Purple Block: again... wool...curtains...

Piece of Wood: Wood used for mishkan including the Aron and the Shulchan

When the Parsha is a little more happening (i.e., more stories and mitzvos) the bag can get a little more exciting- but this is the gist of what we try to do each Shabbos.

Another example from Parshas Beshalach (a little more exciting...): A toy horse and toy carriage (sus v'rochvo rama vayam), a Russian Doll (Avodah Zara), A poland spring water bottle (had pictures of trees, on one side wrote sweet and the other bitter- for waters of Mara), coffee and sugar (bitter and sweet- again, waters of Mara), different toy foods to represent Manna, a tambourine (for Miriam's tambourine), toy fish (for kriyas yam suf...)... ok, you get the point.

I give credit to Shoshana Schechter of Stern college who inspired us once during a class on webyeshiva by telling the class about some parsha shtick they do at their shabbos table with their kids. We've been adding to this and loving the concept ever since!

Give it a try at your Shabbos table and let me know how it goes (adults like it too!)

Have a great week!

Yael

Parshas Ki Tisa

Thanks so much to my readers for liking my blog :-). I haven't had an "introduction" to the blog yet because I don't have a real message of inspiration to hand over. This is my outlet and way to let some family/friends in on our fun life, as well as a potential way to connect to other involved Moms who want to make their time with kids meaningful and possibly educational as well, and help our kids get the message that Torah and Frumkeit are FUN. This blog also gives me incentive to really plan our activities. Possibly as or most important, it's a reminder that being stay-at-home parent (or even just an involved parent) is an important and challenging job, and it doesn't mean you are letting your brain go to mush. Maybe that's a decent introduction.


Opening activity: read Parsha book: (ignores Egel... probably a wise move for little kids despite leaving out a huge part of the parsha...)

Interesting note.....The parsha book explained that the "Kohanim had to wash their hands and feet in the Kiyor before serving HaShem in the Beis HaMikdash". M gave me a puzzled look and asked, "and then do the Kohanim eat HaShem?" It took me a moment to realize what possessed her to ask that rather heretical question..... get it... "serving HaShem?" (lol) she associated it with "serving cookies...." Anyway, I laughed and realized that we should change that line to "before doing the mitzvos for HaShem in the Beis HaMikdash."

We talked about the mitzva of Negel Vaaser (which we try to do in the morning) and the fact that just like the Kohanim needed to wash their hands before doing important mitzvos, we need to wash our hands before we do all the great mitzvos we do as well (we listed some: focusing on being nice to (aka-not beating up...) sister, saying brachos and thank you, kibud av' v'em, etc). I'm happy to say that M seems to really understand that in her own way.

In this parsha, HaShem asks Moshe to do a census of the Jewish people by requiring them to each bring a half shekel. There's a lot to do with this:
MATH: the concept of a half is still challenging to M. I had her color a paper plate to make her "shekel" and we discussed how it is One whole shekel. Then (with new kiddie impossible-to-cut-fingers-or- anything scissors) we cut the "shekel" in half (I KNOW, i know, it wasn't really physically half of a shekel in the Torah. I'm just trying to make a point. I might have scarred her understanding for at least a few years. She'll get over it.) . Then I asked her to show me one half of a shekel- we practiced holding up "half" and putting them back together to hold up "wholes." It sounds silly but in my humble opinion a really important pre-math skill to learn- and she got it. We split a few more things into half, such as our banana snack, and looked at the "half" a cup measurements as we made some hamentaschen for Purim Katan.

(( I've been thinkin g of trying explain the concept of everyone being like "half a coin" and we need other Jews to be complete... and I'd put a picture of her on one half of our "coin" and a pic of her 10 month old sister on the other half..... but I think that's really over her head for now. ))


To explain HaShem "counting," I reminded Miriam of her sticker chart that we add to when she goes to bed (and Stays there) easily. She loves to count those stickers a few times, she's just so excited about them. So that was an easy parable for me to use. "Just like you keep counting your star stickers because you love them so m uch, HaShem loves every single Jewish person so much, and so He loves to count them."

Today I printed out a picture of a pushka-like pitcher from chinuch.org (an excellent resource for Jewish educators ). She colored it with crayons and we cut out photocopies of half-shekels and let everyone in the family put one "in" and M glued and counedt them (again, more math skill-building).

"kiyor" out of three styrofoam bowls, some paint, and pipe cleaners (another idea from chinuch.org)-


Thanks for reading and have a Good Shabbos, and freilichen Purim Katan!
Yael

Alef Bet and Parshas Tetzaveh: First post

This week we decided to try A NEW kRIAH GAME to make learning a little more fun and incorporate some physical activity. Our 3 year old loves to learn thank G-d, but as a three year old, has about a 3 minute attention span when it comes to focusing on alef bet and nekudot.

Alef Bet Obstacle Course

So I printed out large posters of the alef bet (some pictured below), initially just Alef through Daled, and some big cards with the different nekudot. M excitedly chose different spots all around the main area of our apartment to put the alef-bet signs, mostly on the accesible wall, some on places she had to climb over stuff to get to. To introduce the game, I made her run and touch each of the alef bet by calling out commands like "touch the letter that makes the sound "b" !" She loved this right away, so I made it a bit more challenging. I gave her the fiirst nekuda card ( a kamatz) which I called a "key", and called out sounds she should make ("Da!") she had to put the "key" under the letter to "produce" the sound, and then do "the dance," essentially hopping up and down saying the sound she made a few times. She LOVED running around, climbing over things, making each sound and showing me what she knows. When she completed each "level" (each nekuda key with all the letters), she got a small sticker. We got most of the nekudot with all those Alef Bet..... that's alef-bet focus for HALF AN HOUR, which I consider a huge deal for a three year old. We played this game another time this week to, adding three more letters. I think this game is a keeper and we'll keep making it a little more challenging :-).

Parshas Tetzaveh Activities

As usual, we started our parsha learning with our favorite parsha book, "Tell me the Story of the Parsha (below)

it's a little (ok, a lot) too yeshivish for us in some ways (i.e., Jews are only referred to as "Yidden", and some things are a little too midrash-y for us, but we make it up and change the words when reading if need be. This week's parsha was focused on the clothing of the Kohanim- most exciting was that of the Kohen Gadol.

After reading, M excitedly colored the pictures of the bigdei kehuna from aish.com (so, they were all blue, not gold, not multicolored. she has a thing with navy this week. oh well).

Then I got this idea from one of my most favorite blogs written by a supremely amazing woman: http://parshacakes.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html, who inspired us to make "parsha cakes" starting about a year ago. But we're only us + favorite local cousin this week, so we don't need a cake, this idea was converted into cookies.

Choshen Cookies:

The tapestry behind the choshen was woven with gold, white gold, red, yellow, and purple thread.

Used recipe for chocolate chip cookies (levana kirschenbaum), then seperated the dough into four balls, left one plain and dyed others red, yellow, purple w/food coloring, then gently blended the colors together, I think the results were great:

When they were cool and hardened enough, we put some "gold" background (frosting) and stuck on the "stones" of the choshen (jelly bellies). I'm not as creative/motivated/time flexible to do all the Torah-prescribed colors, but we had fun anyway, and I think M has a fun and understandable idea of the choshen at this point... (and excitement to serve and eat them on shabbos)

Ok,that's all for our first blog. We may or may not have time to reveal the contents of this weeks "parsha bag" another time.

Good Shabbos!

Yael