4th Grade scholars just keep learning
Hello 4th Grade families,
Since last we checked in here, our 4th Grade Scholars have been covering the stories of Sarah & Abraham’s call to adventure, Sodom & Gomorrah, and the complex family dynamics of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar.
For Sodom & Gomorrah, we made a cool 3D project of those very wicked cities. We had deep class discussions about it while building. For example, was destroying the cities really the only option? Can people really be wicked on the inside, or do they just make bad choices? The students then thought about what kind of person they each want to be, and what kinds of friends they want to make, to help them get there. At the end of Sodom & Gomorrah: in accordance with positive Torah commandments, the kids got to be the fireballs, and smash the wicked cities that they’d built — it was a super fun way to see how the ethical Torah shows us both what we shouldn’t do, and what we should do, instead.
Next, we covered the relationship between Sarah, Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael. It’s a very complex story with a lot of family relationships in it, which fascinated our highly social scholars. We wrote scripts exploring the moment that Sarah set up Abraham and Hagar together and enjoyed our diverse interpretations of the characters’ reactions. Inspired by the diversity of interpretations, we found a key to why Sarah/Hagar/Abraham all got super upset at each other: if you read the text very closely, Abraham tells Hagar she’ll be his wife, but Abraham tells Sarah that Hagar will still be Sarah’s slave. Whoops.
For Hagar, we tried to understand how she felt, and why she ran away. (Have you ever had too many different expectations on you, all at the same time?)
For Sarah, we had the Sarah cutout listen as we played some Mister Rogers (“what do you do with the mad that you feel”), so Sarah could find some better ways to deal with being angry, instead of taking it out on Hagar.
For Abraham, who didn’t intervene when Sarah mistreated Hagar, we did an activity about how to be an upstander, like if you see people bullying or discriminating against somebody. We made pocket guides for intervening with bias – if only Abraham’d had a pocket guide like this, maybe he could’ve stopped Sarah from mistreating Hagar in the first place!
Some of the classes had time to really get into anti-bias. They were particularly fearsome in defending against hypothetical antisemitism, so we used that energy for other discriminations, too. Go, upstanding students! In all classes, we talked briefly about slavery and anti-bullying, in the context of the story and our lives. Those who want to continue this discussion at home, there’s a whole lot of meat there!