Seekers Has Begun!

Our first week of Seekers Holistic Hebrew School was a big success! With the Romemu Center as our new home base, and the spirit of the High Holy Days fresh in our minds, we are starting the year strong. Seekers is bigger than ever before at sixty-seven students and counting!

In class, students got to know their new classmates, learned about the Hebrew word brit (covenant), and wrote their own covenants or agreements for the space they will create together this year. See below for each class's update.

Kita Alef with Stephanie

Grades K-1

We learned about the Hebrew word brit! We had storytelling time where we learned about Abraham's brit with the Divine. We made promises to each other in order to figure out how to make the classroom an awesome place this year! Then we had a choo choo train of Aleph Bet Song conductors, wrote and decorated our names in Hebrew and English. And ran off to show our work to our parents.

Kita Bet with Batya

Grades 1-2

In our Hebrew lesson, we learned the first 2 letters of the Aleph Bet using our workbooks and the children were able to demonstrate the shapes of the letters using their bodies while making the corresponding sounds. We also learned about Parshat Noach and the flood. The children worked as a team to create visual and audio sounds of the rain and flood by snapping, clapping, and thumping with their hands and feet. We learned the meaning of the word brit and created a rainbow out of construction paper. Each student got to write a personal covenant for our classroom on our collective rainbow. Some children wrote that they would be kind to one another, while others voiced their commitment to care for planet by using less plastic.
We had a great day of bonding and learning!

Kita Gimmel with Yardena

Grade 3

We started with fun introduction games to get to know each other before transitioning into Hebrew exercises. We spent the remainder of class working through our brand new Hebrew binders and diving into vowels. The kids had a great time and we look forward to future classes!

Kita Daled with Heather

Grade 4
We spent some time getting to know each other along with Kita Hey. We learned how to say "my name is" and "thank you" in Hebrew as we played a game to learn each others' names. After this, we explored the early stories of Genesis and talked in depth about the story of Noach and the covenant or brit that is made between God and Noach at the end of the story. We brainstormed values that we thought might be good foundations for a promise between members of a shared community.  In culmination, we began creating our own class brit, inspired by the rainbow that God showed to Noach as a sign of their shared promise. 

Kita Hey with Yonatan

Grade 5

We talked about how we can create a kehillah kedosha (a holy community) amongst ourselves and what that means. We also learned how we create like God did in Creation and what we can learn from that about our creative powers. 

Kita Vav with Yonatan

Grade 6

In Kita Vav this week, we learned about Bereshit (Genesis), and the creation story. We learned that there is more than one creation story - there is no one Torah, no one way of understanding the world. There are multiple points of view and ways of understanding the Torah and our experiences and how that makes for a diverse community as we go forward together. We each have to add our own point of view. 

Kita Zayn with Heather

Grades 7-8
Week 1: We spent some time getting to know each other. We reviewed the early stories of Genesis and did a deep-dive into the Noach story. We thought about what it might feel like to experience the power dynamics that Noach witnessed and how God's eventual covenant with Noach might have been a way to restore a sense of safety and security. Then we took some time to begin brainstorming values as well as specific ways we can "walk" those values out in the classroom. We wrapped up by beginning an art project that will be used as our class brit for the remainder of the year.

Week 2: We finished the art project from last class and read the final list of values and rules that we wanted to have guide our classroom. In addition, we spent some time thinking about our favorite places to spend time and brainstormed what made those spaces special. We generated a list and worked to transform this into a set of classroom norms alongside the brit. We introduced the idea of wearing kippot as a way of recognizing that this is a special space and reminding ourselves to "Get out of our heads" when we are together. We wrapped up by beginning a brainstorm of Jewish things we wish to learn this year.