Zimmer Young Toddler: Passover

Hey look at our Shabbat table! It looks different. “Where challah?” some curious friends asked.

Great question.

Actually, this table isn’t set for a Shabbat Dinner - it’s set for the Passover Seder meal. There’s no challah on Passover; just matzah. And look - here’s the candles, kiddush cup, grape juice and seder plate for Passover.

Why no challah?” a young voice called out.

We are questioning and wondering - open and ready to learn something new.

Traditionally the Seder meal is filled with many provocative things for this very purpose: To get the children asking (Hence the tradition of the Mah Nishtana - the 4 Questions all are encouraged to ask). Once our curiosity is evoked we are open to listening and learning about the story of our slavery in Egypt long ago. It is this sincere curiosity which Zimmer seeks to encourage in the children so that they can grow be real earnest learners in life.

And so we began telling the Passover story from our Haggadah book, along with many puppets and props to add in the fun. We were encouraged to feel empathy for the slaves who were so sad with all their hard work, and we shared in their joy as Hashem sends Moses to help set them free.

Please use the Passover story book inserted in your child’s expandable haggadah as a means for them to share the story and songs with you.

The children had the opportunity to make their own matzah from scratch at our model matzah bakery. Grinding the wheat for flour, squishing and rolling out the dough was quite a hands on experience of what it takes to make this simple food.

The children were also given the opportunity to make a matzah (or afikomen) bag of their own.

After putting pieces of colorful tissue paper on a piece of material, we sprayed water on top until everything was all wet. “Blue go on there!” was heard as the color bled onto the material. We then looked at the sample matzah bag on the seder table and pointed out that there were letters on it. Morah told the children that it says the word “MATZAH”. Although we don’t know our letters yet or know how to read, telling this to the children raises their awareness of letters and words in the world around them.

To help us focus on specific mathematical, cognitive skills that are age appropriate we chose to mesh the holiday symbols into fun number and language games.

We used matzah picture cards numbered 1-5 to practice counting. Here we are learning to count one to one correspondence as we slowly count using our finger as our pointer to number one object at a time. We used picture cards to play a language game focusing on vocabulary words as big and small or big/medium/small with Passover images. Sometimes we group all the large pictures together, or all the small pictures together and other times we place all the similar object pictures in ascending order.
Now that we are familiar with the items of the Seder meal, the children each worked on manipulating their little fingers to glue the objects onto a picture of the Seder in their expandable Haggadah. How exciting it will be to see us add details, cutlery people and the like to this very page as we learn more about the holiday in coming years.