8 Passover Activities for Kids of All Ages

Engage children in the story and traditions of Passover with these fun crafts and activities! From helping to decorate the seder table to learning about the ten plagues with hand-made puppets, these activities will help children feel like a part of the holiday.

A Playful Passover Seder Kit

This eBook from TCJewfolk is full of crafts and activities for toddlers and preschoolers, from building a matzah house to coloring pages featuring seder plate items. The activities here will both entertain and educate this Passover!

A Passover Lesson Plan for 3rd & 4th Grade
These lesson plans, written by A Family Haggadah author Shoshana Silberman, focus on slavery in ancient Egypt and draw connections between ancient and modern slavery. An informative unit for older students.

Create a Beautiful Elijah's Cup
Elijah's cup is an important part of the Passover seder. This craft from The Shiksa in the Kitchen is great for older children, or young children with some adult assistance. Instructions here.

A Handmade Matzah Cover
Matzah is a ubiquitous part of every seder - and now it can have its very own unique cover! We like this matzah cover because it holds three pieces of matzah, each one in its own pocket. This craft is perfect for classrooms or at home. Instructions here.

From Highlights Kids.

 

Passover Puppets
Tell the story of Passover in a fun and interactive way using these Passover finger puppets! Kids can color and cut out these finger puppets to put their own unique touch on the Passover tale. Template here.

From Ann D. Koffsky.

A Plague of Frogs
It has been decided - the plague of frogs is certainly the one to illustrate through crafts. Over at Creative Jewish Mom you can fold origami frogs (great for classrooms of older students) or make these little critters from pom-poms and pipe cleaners.

Make Your Own Seder Placemat
These seder placemats are a sweet handmade touch to a seder table, and reinforce the significance of each item on the seder plate. Instructions here.

From InCultureParent.

 

Create a 3-D Moses
With a template and a toilet paper roll, make a 3-D figure of Moses for storytelling or as a decoration for the classroom or seder table.

From DLTK.

Lesson Plans and Activities for Yom Hashoah

Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is next week. Are you planning a program?    Many schools and community organizations create programs to observe the gravity of the Holocaust and to educate and create awareness among future generations. Creating compelling programming for schools can pose a challenge, especially for children in younger grades who have not yet learned about the magnitude of the Holocaust. Children's picture books can be important tools for teaching about the Holocaust. Our books give children a first glimpse at history through unique lenses--modern cave exploration, collecting paper clips, a journey into space, and even from through perspective of a neighborhood cat.    We know teachers are busy. We've done the work for you. Kar-Ben has several free guides for teachers. Free and downloadable, these eSource guides provide pre- and post-reading questions, plus suggestions for activities that can be scaled for age appropriateness.    All of our book selections are available as eBooks, too. Using a projector or SmartBoard, an entire class, grade or school can experience these powerful books together.    Benno and the Night of Broken Glass    A neighborhood cat observes the changes in German and Jewish families in Berlin during the period leading up to Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. This cat's-eye view introduces the Holocaust to children in a gentle way that can open discussion of this period.        Buy the eBook    Buy the print book   Download free eSource            Keeping the Promise   Follow the incredible journey of a small Torah scroll from a Dutch rabbi to a Bar Mitzvah boy during the Holocaust and finally to Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, who died on space shuttle Columbia.    Buy the eBook   Buy the print book   Download free eSource            The Secret of Priest's Grotto     According to legend, a group of Jewish families survived the Holocaust by hiding out for months in the 77 miles of caves in Ukraine known as Priest's Grotto. Cavers Taylor and Nicola chronicle their trip to explore the caves and uncover the story of the survivors. Buy the eBook  Buy the print book  Download free eSource       Six Million Paper Clips At a middle school in a small, all white, all Protestant town in Tennessee, a special after-school class was started to teach the kids about the Holocaust, and the importance of tolerance. The students had a hard time imagining what six million was (the number of Jews the Nazis killed), so they decided to collect six million paperclips, a symbol used by the Norwegians to show solidarity with their Jewish neighbors during World War II.      Buy the eBook  Buy the print book  Download free eSource     Planning a program or looking for new ideas? Share with others on our Facebook page.

Teaching, Trees, Tu B'Shevat and a Theater Exercise

Authors Peninnah Schram and Rachayl Eckstein Davis have created a wonderful free guide to their new book The Apple Tree's Discovery. The guide includes many topics relevant to Tu B'Shevat like the Jewish perspective on trees, plus many excellent activities for educators that provoke thought and excite the imagination.

Here is a sample Theater Exercise from the guide, which you can download here:

Teacher gives instructions and gets the children to act according to the instructions:

“Pretend you are a seed. Get as tiny as you can. Pretend you are snuggling deep into the ground. But now imagine the kind of seed you are and what kind of tree/flower/bush/plant you will become. What will you look like? What kind of colors will you have for your leaves and/or flowers? What kind of shape and size will you grow into?

The season is winter and the ground turns cold and hard, but you are protected below the surface of the earth. Then the warmth of the spring sun begins to thaw the earth. The rains fall. The seed begins to push through the earth. It’s hard for a little seed to push through, but as it grows, it pushes harder and soon breaks through.
 

Now feel the sun; the wind; the rain; the wind. And the seed grows and grows. And soon it is a full size tree or flower or bush or plant. And now you celebrate because you have your leaves or flowers or fruit. Sway with the wind. Dance with the sun. Show your love of the world.”

illustration by Wendy W. Lee, from The Apple Tree's Discovery