It's not babysitting

So what exactly are our children doing on the high holidays while the adults are in the main sanctuary? 

Over the years we have spent a lot of time considering what our children need to learn about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We mapped out the major themes and then created a spiral curriculum with learning objectives for each grade level. Many of these goals we return to year after year with increasing sophistication. For example, in Kindergarten we talk about how everyone makes mistakes,that we need to say we are sorry for the things we have done wrong and how Yom Kippur is the day we focus on this. In third grade we discuss how there is atonement between people and atonement between a person and God. And finally in fifth grade we take a look at examples of forgiveness in the Torah. 

We took these educational objectives and created engaging activities for our students. Finally, we pair these activities with an age appropriate service.  So when you pick up your child on the playground at the end of the service, engage them in a conversation about what they did that morning because it was not just babysitting.