Religion Lesson - What Jews Believe: G-d
I have started using courses on www.chabad.org for our home religious school for our middle schoolers. We just finished their most recent course on prayer taught by Rabbi Shmuel Kaplan. (Discover the Heart of Prayer) It was such a successful educational experiment, I decided to use the course by Rabbi Manis Friedman, What Jews Believe, for our second unit. Chabad has an app called Jewish.tv that will stream the videos, but there is some benefit from going to the website, cause there are handouts, discussion questions, and quizzes.
I thought I would share some of our discussion topics for these lessons in the event someone comes upon this blog and would like to use these lessons in their Jewish home school. The first lesson is What Jews Believe: G-d.
To prepare the kids for this lesson, we talked about the human brain. We talked about how a baby learns to talk. We start by playing naming games with our babies - mama, dada, cat, dog, doll, bear... Once the baby can label objects, verbs come, then adjectives and adverbs. We work from concrete to abstract. We talk about what we experience with our senses, then we talk about what others have experienced with their senses. It is only with great difficulty and imperfect language that we talk about things outside the realm of human existence.
So one day we start asking baby, "how many eyes do you have? How many ears?" And we count "One" "Two". Baby starts to learn numbers. Baby learns to assign one number to each object. Baby can count. What is infinity? The kids offered numbers that get bigger forever. Ah, not only bigger forever, smaller forever. We reviewed what the number line looks like. Talking point #2, human existence is finite, everything we know has boundaries. It is fairly impossible to truly grasp infinity.
We talked about how crucial language is to higher level thought. What are thoughts without language? Sensory perceptions? The limitations of our brains make our attempts to understand G-d imperfect. That is why we study our whole lives in effort to know "Him" better. As we learn in Lesson 1, that striving for understanding, that striving for connection - Oneness, is exactly why He created us to begin with.
These are the things to think about when we say the Shema.
I thought I would share some of our discussion topics for these lessons in the event someone comes upon this blog and would like to use these lessons in their Jewish home school. The first lesson is What Jews Believe: G-d.
To prepare the kids for this lesson, we talked about the human brain. We talked about how a baby learns to talk. We start by playing naming games with our babies - mama, dada, cat, dog, doll, bear... Once the baby can label objects, verbs come, then adjectives and adverbs. We work from concrete to abstract. We talk about what we experience with our senses, then we talk about what others have experienced with their senses. It is only with great difficulty and imperfect language that we talk about things outside the realm of human existence.
So one day we start asking baby, "how many eyes do you have? How many ears?" And we count "One" "Two". Baby starts to learn numbers. Baby learns to assign one number to each object. Baby can count. What is infinity? The kids offered numbers that get bigger forever. Ah, not only bigger forever, smaller forever. We reviewed what the number line looks like. Talking point #2, human existence is finite, everything we know has boundaries. It is fairly impossible to truly grasp infinity.
We talked about how crucial language is to higher level thought. What are thoughts without language? Sensory perceptions? The limitations of our brains make our attempts to understand G-d imperfect. That is why we study our whole lives in effort to know "Him" better. As we learn in Lesson 1, that striving for understanding, that striving for connection - Oneness, is exactly why He created us to begin with.
These are the things to think about when we say the Shema.