We've been on vacation this week, and I've spent a lot of time preparing for our Purim unit. When we return, my first job will be to make sure that everyone knows the story behind the holiday. Some of my students attended a Jewish preschool, and some of them will have learned about Purim at home, but some will be hearing the story for the first time. I have to make sure we are starting with some common understandings.
When I teach Tanakh (Bible) to my kindergarteners, I want them to engage with the original text as closely as possible. I want to give them the opportunity to develop their own interpretations of the stories, and I think it's almost impossible to do that when reading from a picture book, because a good author rightfully makes his/her own choices about how to interpret the characters and their motivations. (If you are interested in hearing more about how one wonderful author made those choices, here's an interview I did with Eric Kimmel when his version of the Megillah, The Story of Esther, came out.)This year, I've decided to experiment with writing my own version of the Megillah. I used the website Bible Gateway along with the original Hebrew to compose my "edition." My goals were to simplify the story and the language while trying to preserve much of interesting-ness of the text (for example, phrases that are repeated numerous times.) I tried very hard not to insert my own voice or interpretations. You can take a a google doc of my version here. It's still a work in progress, and I expect it will be for quite some time.
One of the many challenges I grappled with in adapting the megillah is what do about all the violence. (We'll save the sexism for another post.....) These days, very few stories for young children feature characters killing each other or planning to kill one other, and one really can't quibble with that trend. But we all know that traditional fairy tales and folk tales are full of villains who want to kill a protagonist and end up getting killed themselves. I'm one of those teachers/parents who happens to think that these kinds of stories are actually healthy for children. This is in part influenced by my reading of The Uses of Enchantment early in my career (though I think he goes way over the top with his Freudian analysis), but mostly influenced by my observations of children. I'm thinking in particular of our yearly study of Hansel and Gretel. Year after year, children simply go batty over that story - they LOVE it. They clamor for version after version, and they go positively wild when the children push the witch in the oven. And really, isn't Haman a lot like that witch? He's purely evil. He wants to destroy our people in a cruel and horrible way. And in the end, he himself is destroyed in that same cruel and horrible way. I'm no psychologist, but I think kids find a lot of comfort in these neat, tidy resolutions of the frightening scenarios that everyone imagines from time to time.
If you take a look at the google doc , you'll notice some other features that go along with the story. I'm modeling our unit on the Junior Great Books Read Aloud program, which I use in my Kindergarten classroom. Great Books calls for three readings of a story - the first time with no interruptions; the second time as an at-home reading with a parent, with pauses to respond to interpretive questions; and a third reading in class, with pauses to hear the responses children came up with at home. The in-school readings are followed with a writing, art or drama activity. I've written four interpretive questions for home use, and included two questions for children to respond to in class in pictures and/or writing. Because the story of Esther is long, I may divide the story into part one and part two, and stretch our reading out over a few days. In my next post, I'll share how this went, and what other activities we engaged in to bring the story to life. I know that we'll be transforming the dramatic play area into a castle, and later in the week we'll be reading a number of picture book versions of the same story. I'll be interested to see if they notice the way they differ from one another, and how they differ from the "original."
While preparing the story, I also needed to spend time this week getting ready for our art exploration. I met with Cathy Topal to plan out our Beautiful Stuff unit. She'll be joining my class on Monday afternoon to facilitate exploring and sorting the "stuff" kids bring to school in their bags. I'll try video the entire lesson and share it in next week's post. To get ready, Cathy and I had fun going through some beautiful stuff while sitting together on her kitchen floor.
I don't think I've ever been so excited to head back to school after vacation. I can't wait to get started!
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