Hazon Educational Library: Food

The Topsy Turvy Bus facilitates rethinking the current, nonrenewable, and often damaging systems of the world we live in. This summer's theme was focused on water usage and conservation. Through hands on activities, the programs aims for participants to understand how we can keep our resources in the cycle. Specifically, this curriculum touches upon the carbon cycle, the soil cycle, and the water cycle. This station was one stop on a 4 station rotation.

Using Rosh Hashanah as a springboard, the children will learn about bees and how they make honey. They will participate in a hide and seek type game before a wrap up discussion and honey taste test.

Students will learn how to make flour from wheat and make matzah from the flour.

This program helps us explore and expand our relationship to Maror. After learning through a text study that the definition of Maror is different and also more expansive than we might have thought, participants will get to taste and then plant a wide variety of bitter leaves that could grow in their region in time for Passover.

This program can be incorporated into holiday programs for a harvest holiday (Sukkot, Passover, or Shavuot) especially during a Shmita year. It provides an interactive introduction to Shmita, including the basis of Shmita in Jewish text and the connection between Shmita and sustainable agriculture.

This program is an informational and hands-on dive into artisanal/DIY chocolate making. Participants will learn all of the steps in the process--from how cacao trees were first cultivated in ancient mesoamerica, to how to wrap their gelt in foil. Taste, touch, history, mysticism, and science are all called upon to make coherent the relationship between chocolate, ecology, and Judaism.

This event is Shoresh?s 4th annual fundraiser celebrating our ten year anniversary. We gathered over 400 people to learn about our organization and our impact while enjoying delicious food in community. Our internal goal was to raise money to support our efforts, introduce new community members to our organization, and honour the many people who have been involved over the years.

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.

Children planted seeds in a soil-filled wagon, which could easily be transported from classroom to classroom, and watched them grow over the course of four weeks. The culmination of the program was to bring the children and wagon out to the J's main garden to see how their plants fit into a larger picture and to allow them to sample many of the things they helped grow. The program also touched on topics such as where food comes from, Hebrew vocabulary, composting, using the five senses, and making observations.

Before the flood while Noah was readying the animals, a midrash says his wife Naamah was collecting seeds and plants. Through this lens, we'll explore plant life cycles, seed saving, and Jewish ideas of sustainability.