We Love Our Animals!

I hope you enjoyed the nice long weekend and are gearing up for another great family session in Yad b'Yad this Sunday. At our last session, we talked about many of the students' favorite subject - animals! The middah that encourages us to be kind to animals is called tzar ba'alay chayim. Treating animals with respect and dignity is very high up in our priorities as Jewish people. We talked about some of the laws related to treating animals nicely and why we care about our animals so much. We watched a G-dCast video that discusses the torah portion that is most often referenced when discussing this middah. Check it out here -

After a lively music and TPR session, we spent time thinking about what our favorite types of animals would say if they could speak to us. Each group then performed skits as their favorite animals - we had dogs who said "I love you!" and hamsters who explored the classroom while the students were at home.

I look forward to seeing you all this Sunday!

Stay warm,
Julie

Happy New Year!

It's hard to believe we're already nearly two weeks into 2013. Hopefully everyone is still going strong on their New Year's Resolutions! We had a great first week back in Yad b'Yad. We talked about avodah (prayer), which is one of the most central tenants of Judaism. However, it can also be a challenging subject to teach and understand for younger children. For the past several weeks in tefillah, Rabbi Greninger has been asking the students to think about when and why they pray and we had a similar conversation in class. Students answered that they most often pray to ask for something (like a good teacher or for someone to feel better) or to say thank you (for our parents, friends and lives). The students had great responses!

As we discussed as families, the Shema and Modeh Ani are great "bookends" to your day with Modeh Ani in the morning and the Shema right before we go to sleep. Here are a few photos of you all working together:

Here are Aeryn and her dad adding their family onto Aeryn's shema pillowcase! 

Danny and his mom work on tracing the letters of the shema onto the pillowcase - great idea!