Freedom School 4/20 Class Recaps

K-6 and Parents: This weekend, we continued our year-long work on Building our Spiritual Core by talking a lot about mountain hiking: If you were climbing Mount Tam, how would you prepare? What would you take with you? What would you do on the way up and back? These questions led us to… How is climbing Mt. Tam like praying on Shabbat morning? From here, we explored the spiritual stretches, ascents, and peaks of the Shabbat morning (Shacharit ) service and created our own mountain climbing experience of a shabbat morning.

K/1 w/ Hannah: Laura was away today. The students started the Passover unit, reading the stories of Moses as a child - in the nile and talking to the burning bush. Then we looked for God all around us - as a scavenger hunt in the classroom and in our lives. Finally, we reviewed the Passover symbols and made hand-drawn seder plates!

2/3 + 4/5 w/ Anyssa + Doria: This week the 2nd/3rd and 4th/5th grade cohort spent the first hour of Freedom School learning alongside Joel and all the families in the spiritual core workshop and discussed how prayer is like climbing a mountain. For the rest of the day, both cohorts prayed together in t’fillah and made some amazing Passover Journals to document their Passover seders during this week. They created some great interview questions to ask at seder. How did they do??

6th w/ Jaime: This weekend the 6th graders started a field guide to animals of Bamidbar (Numbers, the fourth book of Torah). They first searched Bamidbar for evidence of animals and then created field guide pages for the animals they found. While doing this, the 6th grade scholars considered questions like what the animal's relationship with God might be or if any parts of the stories conflicted with their values. We ended up with a fantastic field guide full of lions, quails, dolphins, sheep, and snakes.