Our Tzedakah Project (so far!)

Documentation for the week of September 19-23, 2016

What Is Tzedakah?

We began our Tzedakah Project a few weeks ago at a morning meeting with this conversation:

Morah: What happens when we give Tzedakah?

Leah: It gets heavy.

Morah: It does get heavy, then sometimes we come back and it's empty again.

Bayla: Where does it go?

Morah: Who do we help with our Tzedakah?

Oree: Poor people.

Morah: Everyone needs help sometimes. How can we use Tzedakah to help?

Eliya: I don't know

Morah: What might people need?

Lucy: Food

Ariel S.: Drinks

Ariel F.: Food

Morah: Can we help anyone besides people?

Eliya: I want to give food to all the animals.

Imie: I want to help Hashem.

Morah: Where can we help Hashem? Who serves Hashem?

Imie: I do!

Morah: What about a place that serves Hashem? Where do we go on Shabbos?

Bayla: To Shul!

Morah: Which Shul can we help?

Oree: The big Shul!

Morah: Is there more than one Shul? Or is ours the only one?

Children: There's more than one.

Morah: Where are the other ones?

Bayla: In New York.

Lucy: They are our neighbors.

Morah: Which Shul do we want to help?

Oree: Our Shul.

Who Do We Help?

After our initial conversation, the morahs created a provocation for the children to vote on who we should help. We used their ideas to provide possibilities and gave them each a block with their name on it to cast their vote. Lucy took her voting block and put it by a picture of pets, then said, "I want to be a veterinarian so I want to help the pets." Imie said, "I want to help our Shul because it's the same as our school." These conversations continued throughout the first day of voting. The children spoke to each other and the morahs about why they were making their choices and who they hoped our class would choose to help. 

The polls closed at lunchtime, and we created a bar graph in the afternoon. This provided an opportunity to learn how we can use paper, markers, and symbols to represent real life experiences. It also promoted pre-math skills and number recognition as well as learning about how important a ruler can be! Bayla and Eliya helped Morah Tara count the votes and create the bar graph. Later, they shared it with their friends and explained to them about what it meant. It was amazing to see how quickly Bayla and Eliya became the experts. They specifically pointed out the zero line, showing that they understood that when there was no bar, there were no votes. This shows their recognition that when there can be something there can also be nothing: another important math skill.

On our second day of voting, we narrowed down our choices by putting out only the options that the children had voted for the day before. We discussed the concept of what it means to narrow down your choices, and how it can help in decision making. The children got a chance to vote again, and make another bar graph in the afternoon. The polls closed again at lunchtime, but Imie shared that she was very uncomfortable with her vote. After a while, Morah Tara realized that she was trying to say that she was hoping to change her vote, and allowed her to do so. Bayla saw that Imie had made a change, and told us that we needed to make another bar graph to represent the new results, so we sat down and made another one. Imie used the one that Bayla and Morah Tara made together to create her own. It was clear from the bar graph that the children had chosen to help our Shul with their Tzedakah money.

At morning meeting the next day, we asked the children about how we could use Tzedakah money to help our Shul. We came up with a list of items that the synagogue might need while we were in our classroom, then we walked around the building looking for items that we could possibly donate. The children found mezuzahs, pushkas, teffilin, and many other items. Once we had a list created, we took it to Rabbi Deitsch to ask for his expert advice. The children sat on the couch and discussed their discoveries with him. He helped us narrow down our choices to items that were reasonable to purchase with a penny a day from each child.

Once we gathered all the information we needed, we created another voting provocation. This time the children were deciding what we should donate to our Shul. As they continued their work with our Tzedakah Project, they began to learn the concept of a donation: we use money to buy items or services that can help our community. This is different than helping through actions such as volunteering. It is easy for children to see how they help each other through action every day in our classroom and at home. Focusing on how money can also help, has been a focus of our learning. The children cast their votes again. This time they all gathered together around the voting table and counted the votes as they were cast. They excitedly added to their count as most of their friends chose to donate money to buy apples for Rosh Hashanah. Since this vote was so important to our next step, we left the polls open for two days. The children came and changed their vote a few times, but the results did not change in the end.

How Do We Help?

When we decided to donate apples for Rosh Hashanah, we created a new provocation for the children to explore what money is, how it works, and how we can know if we have enough money to purchase apples at the store. Money is a very advanced concept for four-year-olds, but we chose to offer an opportunity for learning and see where the children went with it. The first thing the children did was a one-to-one correlation activity placing one coin in each picture of a penny that they saw. As they continued their work, they noticed that not all the coins look the same. We helped them to notice the small differences in the coins so that they could match the pennies to the pennies, the nickels to the nickels, etc. 

We then started asking the children if we had enough money to buy our apples. This puzzled them, and they considered it for a while. They decided that if we fill up the page, we should have enough. Unfortunately, this is not how we set up the provocation. We set it up in hopes that they would see how many of each type of coin would equal a dollar. They began questioning us about the equal symbol. We shared that it meant, "the same as." Once they began understanding this concept, we transformed our provocation to reflect how much each coin was worth in relation to a penny. This flipped our math exploration from understanding what 100 means to what 1 means. Imie began to explore this concept and after a few minutes she realized that we wouldn't have enough of our own Tzedakah money to buy apples!

Taking Action

Morah Tara asked Imie what we should do, and she said, "Get more money!" Morah Tara asked how we should do that, and she responded, "We can ask Vella's class!" So Morah Tara took Imie to the Green Room where they happened to be davening! She asked them if they would be interested in donating their Tzedakah money to our project, and they agreed that it would be a good idea. She then took their Tzedakah, told her friends in the Rainbow Class about it, and added it to our Tzedakah provocation. 

Next week we will gather our coins and take them with us on our first field trip to Albertsons Grocery Store where we will be given a tour of the produce department. After that we will give our apples to our Shul where they will be offered to the community on Rosh Hashanah! When we have completed the entire process, we will begin voting again about who we should help with our Tzedakah money next.

Teacher Reflection

It became clear that the morahs set our money provocation up a bit backwards, but that was okay! We were able to assess where the children's learning was, and adjust our provocation as we went along so that it was meaningful to them. After giving the children a chance to learn about money in a more advanced way, Morah Tara scaled the provocation back to a sorting opportunity. She placed four bowls in front of the plate of mixed Tzedakah coins so that the children could begin recognizing the differences in the coins. They will have a chance to sort money in this way, and then we will move on to setting up a one-to-one correlation opportunity next week so that they can see whether or not we have the amount of money we need to buy apples by filling up the chart that we provide for them.