K–5 Lesson
Teacher’s Guide
One People, Many Faces
Who are the Jewish people? · Grades K–5, in two tracks
K–5 Lesson
Children already know what a group is. They belong to a family, a class, a team, a town. This lesson adds one idea to what they already know: the Jewish people are a people, a very old and very large extended family with a shared story, a homeland, a language, and customs that look different in different places. Many children, and many grown-ups, picture Judaism only as a religion, or picture Jewish people as one kind of face. An Ethiopian Jewish child in Israel, a Jewish child in Shanghai, and a Jewish child in Brooklyn look different, eat differently, and speak different languages at home, and all three belong to the same people. For the students, the lesson is simply: here is one people with many faces, and here is what holds them together.
The idea a child should leave with: A people is held together by a shared story, not by looking alike. Many pieces, one picture.
Students learn that Jewish people live all over the world, look and cook and speak in many different ways, and still belong to one people. They share a story that goes back thousands of years, a homeland, a language, and holidays. By the end, a student can say what a people is and name one way Jewish families in different countries are connected.
Both are in many public and school libraries. If your library does not have the book for your track, A Moon for Moe and Mo (Jane Breskin Zalben) serves K–2, and Gittel’s Journey (Lesléa Newman) or The Key from Spain (Debbie Levy) serves 3–5. With a substitute, read the “true story” box on the handout aloud before Step 3. It carries the bicycle story the game depends on.
Hold up a whole pomegranate. Do not open it. (Pomegranates are in most US stores from September to January. Out of season, an orange works: one peel, many segments.)
Take the guesses: seeds, juice, “a million little balls.” Do not answer. “We’ll find out at the end. First, a story about a family that celebrates two new years.”
Read the book straight through. Then ask: “How many new years did this family celebrate? Why two?” Land the idea in one sentence: this family is Jewish and Chinese. Jewish families come in many colors and from many countries.
Use the Six Faces sheet (print it, or project it). Show one face at a time. For each: “Where are they? What do you notice?” Let children point at what they see: the clothes, the classroom, the desert, the stone wall. Name the place after they guess. (Each place is printed on a strip under its photo. Fold the strips back before class.)
Write the four on chart paper as the children reach them, with hints where needed: a story, holidays, a language, a homeland. Those four words are the lesson. Leave the sheet up for the rest of the period.
Start with belonging, one minute, modeled first: “I belong to my family. I belong to this class. I belong to this town. What do you belong to?” Take a handful. Then hand out the My Piece of the Picture tile. Each child draws a food, game, or holiday their own family loves, then cuts out the tile. Kindergarten scissors are slow, so pre-cut the tiles, or let children draw while a helper cuts. First and second graders can cut their own. The tiles are hexagons, so they sit side by side like a honeycomb. Collect them and fit them together on the wall inside one big outline drawn on chart paper. A pomegranate outline is the natural shape (the Weitzman Museum’s peoplehood lesson builds its mosaic inside a pomegranate too), and a circle works as well. Leave the wall picture for Step 5.
Bring the pomegranate back. Cut it in half over a plate and hold up one half so the class can see the seeds.
One true sentence to end on: “Many Jewish families eat pomegranate on Rosh Hashanah, the new year in our book.” The fruit is only a prop, and nobody has to eat it.
Draw a bicycle on the board. No introduction.
Pairs, thirty seconds. Take six names aloud and write them on the board beside the drawing. Then the turn: “Here is the catch. A real father, in the 1880s, had to do exactly this, for real, for his son. Let’s find out what he did.” Keep the six names up. The class comes back to them in Step 3.
Before reading, one fact the book assumes: for many centuries Hebrew stayed alive as a language of reading, writing, and prayer, and Jews from different countries sometimes used it to talk to each other. But almost no child grew up speaking it at home. What was new in the 1880s was a child who grew up speaking it as his first language. Name the word people here too: a group so old and so large that it has its own story, its own language, and a place it comes from. Read the book. If the book reaches a moment where the father needs a word that does not exist yet, stop there and let the class guess what he did. If it does not, finish the book and turn to the bicycle on the board.
Hand out A Language Wakes Up. The real answer is on it: the Hebrew word for bicycle, ofanayim, was built from ofan, an ancient word for “wheel,” made into a pair. Compare it with the six names on the board. Someone usually came close. Students invent their own words for three modern objects the same way, by joining two old ideas, and say them aloud to a partner.
Build the answer on the board from what the book showed. A shared story (thousands of years of it). A homeland (the land of Israel, which Jewish families far away kept in their prayers and stories). A language (Hebrew, which a whole people kept in writing until a child spoke it again). Holidays and customs. Then the turn: the same people lived in Yemen, Poland, Ethiopia, Spain, and China, and looked and cooked and dressed like their neighbors. One people, many faces.
Each student completes the last line of the handout: “I am part of ______. What connects us is ______.” A few read theirs aloud. That sentence is the assessment. Then one more turn, with the handouts face down: