Award Certificates: Highlighting Every Student

 

Music, art, writing - recognize every student's achievements at the end of the year with these attractive award certificates.  As teachers, we realize that each student is unique, and that different students excel in differing ways. These certificates for creative achievements such as good ideas, tikkun olam, leadership, and humor along with more traditional ones for writing, art, and participation highlight each student's strengths allowing each student to be recognized for individual achievement. All 24 award certificates are available for free download here.

Shavuot Vocabulary Hunt

In this vocabulary building game for third and fourth graders, students race the clock to find meaning of key words for Shavuot online and in books. Click here to download for free.

Resources for Responding to Violence

Once again, we must help students and parents create a safe framework to process senseless acts of violence. To help you respond to their concerns, we have compiled the following links:

Talking to Children About Violence: Information for Parents and Educators by the National Association of School Psychologists

Responding to Crisis by the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland

If the community is in trouble, a person must not say,

"I will go home, and eat and drink, and all will be well with me..." 

But rather, a person must share in the concerns of the community,
for so we find that Moses, our teacher, shared in the distress of the community... 

Those who share in the community's troubles are worthy to see its consolation.
                                                        Babylonian Talmud Ta'anit 11a

Faux Jerusalem Stone - Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will learn to make faux-Jerusalem stone from simple materials such as masking tape and shoe polish. The technique is easy enough for your students to use in class.

The Butterfly

The poem "The Butterfly," written by a young man imprisoned in Terezin during the Holocaust, has made the butterfly a symbol of the Shoah. This is an especially effective symbol for use with children. The butterfly is representative of the spirit of life and the quest for freedom. In this project, students turn the stars that the Jews were forced to wear into butterflies with one symmetrical fold and their own creativity.

Butterflies can be decorated many ways. Those found in nature show symmetry as does the one in the example which was created using dot stickers and marker lines and dots.

You can read the text of Pavel Friedman's poem here on the Yad Vashem website

Let My People Go - A Book Teaching Guide

This book by Tilda Balsley provides a child-friendly treatment of the plagues and the exodus from Egypt. Read this book aloud to your class in a special reading place or a reading circle. Then, create a plague set such as a bag of plagues, masks, a plague book, or bookmarks (samples are available at the Marshall Jewish Learning Center.)

Instructions for making your own set of plague bookmarks are available on our blog here.

Passover Symbols Sort

In this free graphic organizer, students must manipulate some of the items from the Passover seder, sorting them into three categories based on what they represent: Slavery, Freedom, or Spring. The activity - straightforward in itself - gives rise to discussion about the meanings of the holiday. This can also be great for review.