Happy Channukah

Today we learnt about the Jewish festival of Channukah which starts next week. Shelley told us that long ago before our grandma’s mum’s mum’s mum’s mum’s were born….and even before that, there was a beautiful temple in Jerusalem. It was a special place for the Jewish people to go and pray. Lilian: “What is pray?”

Shelley said that praying is when you say thank you for all the things that you have and ask that you and your loved ones and family, are taken care of. Sometimes when people pray they also say sorry for doing things that they know they shouldn’t do and they say that they will do things differently next time. Usually when you pray, you are quiet and you can say words to yourself or loudly if you want to. Then she told us that there was a greedy king called Antiyochus who wanted the temple for himself and his followers and so he marched down sitting on the back of an elephant, and he chased the people away. He didn’t respect the temple and soon he brought animals into it and the floors became dirty, the beautiful stained glass windows were broken and the everlasting light went out. This light is a precious light and burnt for 24 hours a day.

The people had to clean the temple when they got it back. We sang “With a rub a dub, dub” and we helped clean the temple. Then we sang “I wonder where the oil is?” when the people were looking for the oil. They could only find a small jug with a tiny drop of oil inside it. It takes eight days to make oil from olives so they used the drop of oil and hoped that it would last just for one day. This was the miracle of Channukah. The oil lasted for eight whole days and eight whole nights and this is why people celebrate Channukah for eight days and eight nights. Each night the dad lights one more candle; so on the first night he lights one candle, on the second night he lights two candles etc. He uses a candle to light the other candles. This candle is actually the ninth candle and it is called the “shamash”.

We lit all of the candles and sang “How many candles do we light?”

Shelley asked us what we do on our birthdays, when we light the candles and we told her that we blow them out. She told us that we let the Channukah candles burn without blowing them out at all. She told us to watch the candles carefully and see if anything happens to them. While we were having snack we watched them. At first, we didn’t think that they were looking any different. Then we saw that the “shamash” was bending over. Shelley joked that it was bending over and saying “konnichiwa”. So we ate our snack and then we saw that something was happening. Alexis said: “They are getting shorter”. Lilian: “They are going away”. We tried to think about where they went because by the end of snack, there were no more candles left.

Vincent: “It is in the box”. So we looked inside the box and……no candles. We sang “I wonder where the candles are?” and we could not find them anywhere. We think that they just disappeared. We noticed that there were so colours on the “channukiah” where the candles were. Maybe this was some remaining part of each candle.

During the early part of the morning we did our cooking activity for Channukah. We made potato latkes. We washed and peeled the potatoes, grated them and then cooked them in oil. We had a beautiful smell inside our classroom and waited patiently to eat them. Shelley let some of us taste them before we had our snack shhhhhh! By the time it was snack time, we just wanted to eat more and more and more. We loved eating them. We hope that our mums or dads can make them at home for us as they are really easy to prepare and cook.

We did another 100 piece puzzle today. This time, the picture was of a pirate. Giorgia, Lilian and Alexis spent time doing it. The third activity that we did today was making Christmas bracelets. We had sparkly pipe cleaners in red, blue, pink, green, gold and silver. The beads were in red, green, gold and silver. We threaded the beads onto the pipe cleaner and twisted them around our wrist like a bracelet. Hisami completed our activity using red origami paper for our origami Santa’s. We now all have a Santa Claus in our workbooks/portfolios.

We changed our calendar and sang “Rock, scissors, paper”. We made a crab and a helicopter with our hands.

Thanks for a great day at school everyone!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel