Confirmation Trip to Washington DC

On Thursday, March 24th, thirteen 10th graders, Jennifer Newfeld, Andy Schwebel, and Ari Kaimen descended on Washington DC for four incredible days of bonding, learning and experiencing. We visited the Newseum, saw an exhibit called, "Choosing to Participate" which looked at moments in history where individuals or groups choose to participate and the difference they made, hung out in Georgetown, visited GW Hillel and met Jewish college students, walked a lot, rode the subway, bonded as a group, celebrated two birthdays, prayed as a community, visited a Conservative synagogue, listened to head of the Public Relations Team for the Clinton Administration and the next nominated U.S.ambassador to Israel, worked with the JCC on homeless issues, visited the Capital, Monuments, White House and the Smithsonians.

We did a TON in four days, and it was an incredible experience.  Some of the best parts were....

• "The Holocaust Museum really opened my eyes."
• "Doing Havdalah outside the Kennedy Center as one group together really made me feel like we were one big family."
• "I really enjoyed the Kabalat Shabbat service at Hillel because everyone was there because they wanted to be."
• "The best part of the trip was experiencing DC while at the same time getting to know my classmates."
• "Walking to Shul in the morning with Rabbi Ari which mixed our Judaism with a walking tour of the streets of D.C."

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!