Reflections on the First Day of Sunday School

Welcome to the official blog of the Beth Shalom High School Religious School class!  Steve and I are just so excited about this year.  We will be studying Judaism and the internet and we will use this blog to post reflections about each class.  After this week, much of the content on the blog will come from the students writings and responses that we do in class.

The first day was productive and fun.  We started by googling Judaism and talking about what came up first.  We discussed who the websites were for, who made them, and whether they would go there for information about Judaism.  Next, we learned about everyone's favorite websites and hobbies (including facebook, piano, soccer, and saxophone) and set rules for the class.  Some of them include, no facebook during class, be appropriate and respectful, participate and come to class.  Easy enough!!

We then got into more detail about what we will be doing this year, which is student guided learning using the internet.  Steve and I are not going to teach as much as we will facilitate discussions, research, questions, writing prompts, etc.  The goals of the class are for the kids to get excited about Jewish topics, to take ownership of their Jewish education, to relate Judaism to different aspects of their lives and to develop their Jewish identities.  We had a brainstorm of topics they are interested in and came up with:

• Jewish humor
• Israeli-Palistinian conflict
• Famous Jews
• Jewish music
• Community
• Jewish dating
• Facebook
• Youtube

Everyone seemed excited about the year!  Next class, 9/12 will be all about Jewish community and the internet.  We will even have a special guest speaker via Skype -- Patrick Aleph from www.punktorah.org

Please follow our class on Twitter!  If you have any questions please e-mail us at bethshalomhs@gmail.com

Shanah Tovah!!!

-Amanda