Our students come from a wide variety of background, practice, and Jewish knowledge. Although Passover is the most celebrated Jewish holiday in homes across North America, some of our students will likely only experience one if we provide it within our school-based learning community.
A model seder is an exceptional way to accomplish this, an exemplary experiential learning opportunity, and a wonderful way to involve families actively in your learning community. Yet to get the most out of this opportunity, we need to gudie students on important explorations before the event, and provide time for reflection along the way.
The time and activities leading up to a model seder can create an atmosphere of enrichment and deeper learning for your whole community by providing context, building familiarity with concepts, practicing elements of the seder, and engaging in some deeper thinking about its themes. Students will come to the model seder (and to home seders as well) with a greater degree of engagement and understanding.
Here are some ideas from a variety of Behrman House texts and teacher guides to spur your thinking well ahead of time. Sources include My Jewish Year, Sacred Time (Building Jewish Identity Series), and Book of Jewish Holidays. You’ll find even more ideas in the books themselves, appropriate to the age of each specific audience.
Focus on Jewish time:
How do your students prefer to celebrate Jewish holidays? Help them discover their Holiday Personalities with the quiz in Sacred Time.
Focus on foods:
Create an illustrated chart of foods we do and don’t eat during Passover
Make a matzah factory
Focus on elements of the seder:
Use the illustration on page 119 of Book of Jewish Holidays to help students read and translate the Hebrew on the seder plate. Bring a seder plate to class to discuss its elements and the benefits of having celebratory objects for our holidays. Consider creating a class seder plate for your model seder.
Bring appropriate props and have a ‘memorize the plagues’ contest (give extra points for the Hebrew list, and badges or pins to winners.)
Use the Mah Nishtanah Visual Tefillah for Hineni or Kol Yisrael to help guide students to an understanding of the Four Questions.
Use the text in the Passover chapter of My Jewish Year to review the Four Questions and the brainstorm new ones. Have students consider the things we eat during the seder, the story we tell, the things we do before Passover, and the things we do—or don’t do—during Passover. Students can write their new questions on index cards to bring to the model seder.
Have students go even deeper: after reviewing the Four Questions in Hebrew and English hevruta style, have them come together and discuss the real question of the seder: Why do we celebrate Passover?
Focus on themes of Passover:
Have students read an age appropriate version of the story of the Exodus from Let’s Celebrate Passover, Let’s Discover the Bible, My Jewish Year, or Explorer’s Bible, and then create a scrapbook of redemption stories, including redemption from Egyptian slavery. The stories can be personal or historical; they can even come from interviews of family members of members or friends. Each student can be responsible for one page of the scrapbook, providing text and illustration. Compile into one book and make copies for each student to take home, or to incorporate into your model seder.
Encourage students to think more deeply about themes of freedom and slavery by brainstorming ways a modern person can become ‘enslaved’ and consider how they can become free of such enslavements.
Focus on becoming part of the Passover story ourselves:
Have students create a blog for a personality from the Passover story. Brainstorm together: what would Moses’ favorite website be? What music would Miriam listen to? What photo would Aaron post? (The Online Learning Center is an excellent place for safe student created blogs. You can set up a blogging class free on the site.)
Let students be dramatic, and act out scenes from the Exodus. Sedra Scenes contains a variety of short plays based on the parshiot that are perfect for small and larger groups.
Need appropriate haggadot for your model seder?
For very young children, our newest Passover resource, Frogs in the Bed, combines an illustrated version of every preschooler’s favorite Passover song with activates, crafts, and age appropriate approaches to the seder plate, the plagues, and the Passover story. A number of schools have already made Frogs in the Bed part of their model seder plans.
Simply Seder provides a quick yet complete version of the seder appropriate for a mix of ages and accomplishments.
Season of Renewal is an unusually lovely resource, illustrated with flower collages made by children, and perfect for upper elementary aged children and their families.
The New American Haggadah, a revision of Mordechai Kaplan’s classic, helps high school students engage in thinking about the broader themes of slavery, freedom, and justice through the lens of actual historical events in more recent times, including the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, and the Ethiopian migration.
Quantity discounts are available on all haggadahs
