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Passover offers so many opportunities for learning - about Jewish history, the importance of home and holiday observance, and the value of repetition. Here are some resources you can use with students to explore many aspects of the holiday.

In Teach Them Diligently: A Midrash on the Jewish Educator’s Year, Bonnie Stevens describes the haggadah as "our greatest textbook, laying out the lesson plan for a class so important that every Jew must repeat it yearly - the seder." One of the lessons the haggadah teaches us is about the role of questions in learning.

The haggadah doesn't rely on children to devise questions on their own. The Four Questions, for example, are spelled out. Sometimes we may use the haggadah's techniques to prod students to ask questions. And we too are

Think visually, brainstorm, organize, and share ideas.

Create a pose that shows what bravery feels like in your body.

Try tilting your head up and standing straight and tall.

Or try making strong muscles in your arms.

This is one activity to try from the freshly updated Let’s Discover the Holidays series of 4-page folders, designed for children in grades K-2. Invite students to make a circle and do the activity with brave poses. Encourage students to notice where in their bodies they feel brave. (in my muscles; in my heart; my brain; my arms and legs) Suggest they try another pose and see if their brave feeling changes too.

This kind of mindful moment, along with new movement and creative arts activities, thought questions, and crisp, descriptive text, bring the holidays to life. Below are some sample pages from the Celebrating Purim folder for you to try out with your students. 

We now have 285 modern Hebrew word cards available to download - free. 

This collection of printable cards consists of functional Hebrew words and phrases for everday situations, including:

• • greetings
• • colors
• • numbers
• • sports
• • food
• • occupation
• • home
• • countries

The cards include a mix of verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives. Download them here, and be sure to print double-sided for use as flash cards, with Hebrew on one side and English on the other. They are also be available on our home page, under the Play & Learn section.

Benefits of use

Incorporating modern conversational Hebrew can be motivat

A school in Arizona gave its 6th graders Make This Journal: My Bar/Bat Mitzvah Year. The response has been tremendous.