Noah's Ark Theme: Part 1

This week's parsha (Torah portion) is Noach, the story of Noah and the ark. This story can be very child-friendly and can expand to include a variety of learning/play themes and concepts including...

• Animals
• the mathematical concepts of pairs as well as practicing sorting and patterns*
• the teivah (ark), boats and water transportation
• rainbows, the order of a rainbow, the science behind a rainbow, prisms
• colors, color-mixing, primary and secondary colors
• Rain, weather, the water cycle

*I will delve a bit deeper into some activities associated with these skills in a later post

Learning and playing about the story of Noach can include reading together, dramatic play, building activities, arts and crafts, science experiments, fun snacks and more! Here's a peek at what we've done so far...

Dramatic play with our Parshas Noach Discovery Basket

There are a lot of children's books and texts to teach about the story of Noach. Some are more conducive to snuggling up on a lap and listening and beyond that--when it comes to introducing more of the detailed aspects of the story I want to give over to my son-- I utilize props he can enjoy and explore. As he played, I talked about some basic points of the story of the righteous Noach being asked by G-d to build a teivah to protect him and his family as well as a selection of animals from the pending mabul (storm/flood). I explained that Noach needed to collect pairs of both "Mommy" animals and "Tatty" (father) animals, and demonstrated this through having two of each kind of animal in our discovery basket. I did go as far as to say that from kosher animals, he took seven pairs of each kind and from non-kosher animals, he took only two. These numerical concepts are a bit advanced for a two year old, but we are already in the process of teaching him about the difference between kosher and non-kosher animals. To demonstrate how long the mabul lasted, I counted all the way to 40 for him. (He was quite impressed and clapped at the end!)

I went through a few other key points of the story--the end of the rain, the return of the dove to announce safety and dry land, the beautiful miracle of the rainbow G-d sent to show His promise to never again send a mabul, and how Noach and his family built a mizbeiach to show their gratitude. I verbally introduced one of the most important morals learned from this story--one that we try as parents to instill even now in our little one--that even when others are acting in a way that is not nice (as the people of Noach's time were), we must always act kindly as Noach did.

As part of learning about the rainbow, we are working over the course of this week on a texture collage. I squeezed a bit of alphabet learning into today's portion of the activity and introduced the letter "R" for rainbow, red...

...and ribbon! With this age group, I provide materials in only one color at a time. I chose to add a thin layer of glue to the designated strip prior to setting out the paper, but you could assist/direct a toddler to paint on a thin layer of glue if you wish. Older children can work with more than one color at a time and even follow a key (I have a dot of each color on the right side of each strip) or a model to complete their rainbow. You could even set out a seven sectioned serving platter like the one pictured below (these are often available at Dollar Tree) with one color in each section and glue with a brush in the middle. In addition to building skills in sorting and teaching the order of the rainbow, this is a great fine motor activity for little hands and the different textures are a wonderful sensory experience.

Our open play time involved some Mega block teivah building and a variety of puzzles, stacking and sorting materials to teach color recognition.

We focused our science lessons this week on precipitation and the water cycle as well as a fun sink/float activity.

We're watching how clouds form and rain falls!