Hazon Educational Library: Teens

Any Jewish farm, school, community center or garden can use this document to either create a calendar garden with the community or to lead interactive educational programs that situate the holiday and season in Jewish cycles of time. This document gives an overview of the mosaic design process. It does not give detailed instructions for mosaics; seek this out elsewhere if you are not familiar with outdoor mosaics.

This program uses worms to explore how all of G-d's creatures work together to create a functioning garden/society/world. Participants will get the chance to explore the diverse ecosystem of healthy soil, specifically worms, and how it is because of this diversity that our garden can thrive. Students will also draw connections to their own differences between classmates, other community members, etc to see how all folks have a role to play creating a happy world. Using a simple prayer, participants will be able to connect how a praise to G-d for ?varied creatures? can apply to both humans and animals/insects.

This program combines a group walk to compost piles, and a look at vermicomposting bins, with a conversation about the Jewish value of distinguishing between rest and work. Participants will engage in text study and discuss the relationship between adding intention to our time with Shabbat, and adding intention to our space with the placement of compost.

Discussing the four elements - earth, air, water and sun - participants gained a greater understanding of the world they live in. This is a tool to help introduce the days ahead allowing the participants to get excited for what's to come, to be more engaged during the field trip, to connect to nature in their own way.

This program is an introduction to the history and uses of medicinal herbs growing in the Camp Tawonga Garden. Participants will learn about how medicinal herbs connect to self-care and earth-care. Participants will learn about the healing properties of twelve medicinal herbs as well as their cultural and historic uses: Israeli, Mediterranean, Jewish and Native American. Participants will be given the opportunity to and think about what it means to connect both to their herbal heritage as well as the medicinal herbs that grow natively on this land.

Through this activity, campers will be able to walk goats to pasture, learn a melody to Psalm 23, and relate shepherding goats to shepherding humans (through social norms).

Cob is a structural composite of earth-based materials: clay, sand, straw and water. People all over the world have used cob for centuries to sculpt buildings by hand. Learning to build with earth-based materials can broaden participants' understandings of how the earth provides everything that humans need to live. Mixing cob, making cob bricks, or applying cob directly to a larger structure is an embodied means for empowering participants to make things on their own and to source materials sustainably. This lesson also touches on the importance of place in natural building, with a map exploration about how different cultures build with different things based on their environments.

This program is meant to open up participants to Torah of the forest and the farm, to see where the materials come from and to connect to the beauty and awe of a physical Torah. In the fall on the east coast, the forest comes alive with color, as the trees turn and drop their leaves and their seeds. By exploring and examining a few of the elements that make up our physical Torah, participants will walk away with an altered view and understanding of our most central text.

This program is a unique, interactive activity for a festival-style event that combines knowledge of local wild edible plants and the Jewish tradition of Shmita. For this program, the educator creates four unique "trading cards" to pass out at the event, and two examples of local, foraged food. The trading cards serve as a way to get participants interested in the connections between wild edible plants and Shmita, and the food samples demonstrate the ease and accessibility of foraging.

The idea behind this program was to bring Purim to life in the middle of summer- a completely unexpected and ridiculously silly idea.The main goal for camp programming is always have fun, but just beneath that is our responsibility to educate our campers and create connections between Judaism, social justice, environmentalism and help them discover who they are (and who they want to be) in this big wild world. This program offers space for all of this! Campers will be split into small groups and have to overcome challenges placed before them, just like Esther did many years ago and begin to think about how they honor themselves, how they care for those around them, and how they stand up for what they believe in.