How Different Families Celebrate Shabbat

For my lesson plan, I decided to focus on the class I will most likely be teaching next year, which is called Shabbat Club. Shabbat Club is a Friday afternoon class for kindergarteners. Although the class is not only focused on Shabbat, this is what I decided to focus my lesson plan on. I want the children to learn about how they all celebrate Shabbat differently at home. Through sharing their different family traditions students will be able to see that everyone celebrates differently and that there is not one set way to celebrate Shabbat.

This lesson will be one that is ongoing throughout the year, since it will involve each family taking home a "Shabbat box" that I put together. Each Friday evening a different family will take home the "Shabbat box" which will contain candlesticks, a kiddush cup, a challah cover, and a flip camera. The families will have the opportunity to record how they celebrate Shabbat together and show the class actual footage of their Friday night traditions. Because we are a reform community I don't foresee any issues with using technology during Shabbat.

In addition to the weekly "Shabbat box," I will ask the students for words that they would use to describe their own shabbat celebrations and together we will turn them into a tagxedo that the students can take home and share with their families. An example might look like this:

The final component to the lesson would be allowing students to each use a netbook and create a popplet diagramming how they do Shabbat at home. The popplet could look something like this:

To wrap up the lesson we would have a discussion about how our families are different and how they are similar. Students would be able to see that everyone celebrates Shabbat differently and there is no right or wrong way to do it.