Purim

Purim was awesome at Pardes this year. We had Circus Harmony, Sushan celebrations, lots of Megillah reading, all sorts of costumes, thundersticks,  hamantashen and lots and lots of smiles. We boo-ed Haman, gave away a bike and ate tons of sugar. Hope you had fun with us!

 

Check out the great pictures to the right.(Click on the thumbnail photos to see more)

Sherut Luemi

Once a month our "Israeli girls" come to Pardes and spend the morning bringing Israel to our K-5th grade students. Sara and Tova are spending one year of their Israeli National Service living in St Louis and working in Jewish education, connecting students to Israel. Tova and Sara always bring a fun and educational activity to our students. Last month they made Chocolate Balls, an Israeli cooking classic and this month, while teaching about water issues Israel faces they had our students acting out the story of Honi Hamagel (Honi the circle maker) in Hebrew and playing a water relay game. Our students really enjoy the Sundays when a little bit of Israel visits them.

Attention for our Blog!

A few weeks ago I attended a conference on technology in Jewish Education. One exciting part of the conference was the attention the Pardes Treehouse received. Our blog was highlighted during a pre-conference technology boot camp as a model of how a religious school can engage families in classroom learning. Later in the conference our blog was also featured in a technology showcase, where participants could come, see our blog, learn about how we created it and how we maintain it. Educators from across the country were impressed not only with our blog but also with the content of our school! Several educators asked me if they could start following our blog to learn about new educational ideas for their school. This was personally very gratifying; the blog has been one of my pet projects this past year. I would love to hear from you what you think of our blog. After each posting there is a place for comments. I invite you to comment. Myself, as well as all the teachers who blog, would love to hear from those of you who are following us.

Mini-Minyan

Have you heard about Mini-Minyan? It's our new hit monthly Shabbat Children's service. Mini-Minyan meets the second Shabbat of each month (except in March it will be the third) at 10:30am. It's perfect for Religious School and Day School students in K-3rd grades. We've had a total of 30 participants in our first 5 months. and many of those return month after month and make up our core of Minyanairs. During Mini-Minyan, we read stories, create a pray community, share what's happening in our lives, act a bit silly and a bit serious, pretend we are trees and generally expereince a wonderful Shabbat service together. It has quickly become my favorite Saturday morning of the month. Join us, next Mini-Minyan is March 20th.

World Wide Wrap

This morning, Kitah Dalet (4^th grade) joined the morning minyan wearing the mock T’fillin that created with the help of our Men’s Club. It was great to walk into the Chapel this morning and see not only our fourth graders all wrapped up, but so many of their parents participating as well. What a beautiful introduction for our students to this mitzvah. Several of our 7^th and 10^th graders joined as well making me think that maybe we need to make this an annual activity for the school, not just for the fourth grade. So once each class builds their T’fillin in fourth grade, the students and their parents would be invited back each year to “rewrap.” Thank you to the men’s club for making this morning possible, thank you to Claire Hack, our wonderful Kitah Dalet teacher and thank you to all the parents and students who joined us for this special morning. Want to see B’nai Amoona on the on the World Wide Wrap page, click http://www.worldwidewrap.org/reported.html

See you for the next wrap on Feb. 5, 2012.  

Our Madrichim are amazing. We have 19 working in Pardes this year and they are simply fabulous. Madrichim are the teenage assistants who work in our classes, shadow our students and assist in our office and resource room. They work one on one and with small groups, lead classroom activities and are amazing dugmaot, role models.


Our madrichim program keeps our teens connected, involved and role modeling. It provides them with job skills that they can take to college and a refresher of their Jewish knowledge. It provides our students a whole group of “cool” teenagers for them to look up to and learn from, and it allows our student-teacher ratio in our K-7th grade classrooms to be around one to five.


A parent recently commented to me that their children love the Madrichim who have been in their classes. The parent then asked, “How do you manage to get teens here that early, 8:30am, on a Sunday morning.”

How do we do it? Interesting, we had more teens apply to be Madrichim then we actually had positions for this year (although since it is such a great experience, we quickly created valuable positions for everyone who was interested.) Another little known secret, we teach our Madrichim that if they want to be dugmaot they must be continuing learners themselves. Therefore all of our Madrichim are enrolled in some form of Jewish education. We love our Madrichim!

Tikkun Olan Project

On MLK Sunday we took 85 students to Gateway180, the largest emergency shelter in Missouri. It was an amazing day on so many levels. Our day school and religious school students joined together to participate in this Tikkun Olam project. As we were leaving for the morning, Andy Schwebel reminded us how important it is for us to be engaged in this work, especially on Martin Luther King weekend, because we are commanded by our Jewish tradition to help others whenever we can. At the shelter we learned that the average age of a homeless person in St Louis is nine and we discuss what it might feel like for the 60+ children in the shelter to be picked up each morning by the school bus while standing in front of a sign reading homeless shelter. Gateway180 allows women and children to stay for up to 30 days, their goal being to help these families do a

180 degree turn and get them back into a home. While we were there our students painted the dining room, packed 100 lunches, cleaned up the food pantry and played with the kids in staying at Gateway180. It was a great morning of service. My favorite part was watching our kids play with the children there. Some of our older students took younger children under their wing while our 5^thth graders to play with on the playgroup and teach each other games they could all play. At the end of the morning, when the 7^th & 8^th grade boys thanked me for taking them as they walked off the bus, I knew that we ha graders simply found other 5d done an amazing thing this morning for everyone involved.