We spent last week learning about Hanukkah. We learned about the history of Hannukah and how the Jewish people weren't allowed to worship God so they had a big war. The Maccabees fought for 3 years, but they won and were able to worship in their temple again. Then, the miracle happened! They had enough oil to light the menorah for 1 night, but it stayed lit for 8 while they could make more oil.
The children loved learning about this and I was really impressed when they reminded me that this sounded like the pilgrims. They explained that the pilgrims also wanted to be able to worship as they chose.
After we learned the history of Hanukkah, we learned about some Hanukkah traditions. We learned that people who celebrate this holiday love to eat latkes and applesauce. Hopefully we will be able to try these at our Holiday Celebration this year.
We also learned about a little game called spin the dreidel. This game showed up in almost every story that we read, so we had to play ourselves! We played with our table groups and each ended up getting a very generous portion of candy!
This unit was not only fun, but it taught us a lot about what people around the world do at this time of year. While we may not celebrate it, it is still important to know about all of the different things out there in our great, big world!
In the next few weeks, we will be learning about several other holidays that are celebrated this time of year. We will learn about Christmas, Los Posados, and Kwanzaa.
We are making a Winter Holidays tree where we make an ornament from each holiday- it looks great! So far we have our Stars of David finished and we are working on Christmas Candy Canes this week. I can't wait to see it when it is finished!
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