Hello All -
We had a terrific Sunday. First, we made yads with our
artist in residence; they are absolutely beautiful. Then, we headed down
for some mifgash. tHe kids had a quote from the Lego movie and a quote from the
movie Miracle. Both quotes were about being a team and what
teamwork means. We then discussed how often, even when we are in groups of
people that we don't get along with, we find that we bond - or team up - in the
face of a common adversary. Case in point: fighting siblings suddenly
become BFFS when trying to push an agenda past ye old parents…. We discussed
how the Pharaoh had created Jewish taskmasters to be in charge of the Jewish
slaves. By having Jews turn on Jews, the Jewish people were easily
divided. Since Pharaoh's biggest fear was that the Jews would rise up and join
his enemies and rebel against him, keeping us fractured was a very logical
plan. Then, Pharaoh created unreasonable demands upon the Jews: we had to
create a ridiculous amount of bricks in a short period of time, and then we had
to create these bricks without having access to the proper materials. We
created an experiential lesson today that was based upon this model.
There were taskmasters and slaves, limited time and limited supplies.
The kids had to use only one hand, to mimic the emotional and physical
trauma of the slaves, and they could not speak. Taskmasters could speak..
or yell, for that matter! The kids had to build 30 bricks in 8 minutes of
uniform size. NOBODY was able to do this. Then the kids had to put wheels
on each brick (we had no wheels). We recreated some of the desperation
that our enslaved ancestors would have felt. And what did the kids do: they
ganged up and got mad at the taskmasters. This was exactly what we
had planned. NExt class period we will look closely at the text in the Torah
and compare our experience to the actual text.
Have a great February break,
Morah Leah
No comments:
Post a Comment