[HANASHIR:1777] Re: Tot Shabbat

[Joanna Selznick Dulkin <joanna...>]

Having just started doing Friday night and Saturday morning tot shabbatot
myself, thought I would share a few ideas/suggestions.

For Friday night, my "hit" so far is "Az Ich Vel Zingen...L'cha Do-di" (the
chiri biri bam song).  I sing it in English instead of the Yiddish,
however.  Here is my version:

Me: When I sing L'cha Dodi,
    You will answer, "chiri biri bim"
    And when I sing, Likrat Kallah, (here I let out a big OY and the kids
giggle)
    You will answer, "chiri biri bam"
Me:L'cha dodi
Families: Chiri biri Bim
Me: Likrat Kallah
Families: Chiri Biri Bam

etc...

Other verses include:
When I sing "P'ney Shabbat"/"N'kabblah"
When I sing "Shabbat Shalom" /"To Everybody"

The kids *love* the "Oy chiri biri biri bim bam bam" part, and they dance
around.  It's great.  I also do Ellen's "are you ready" song, Boi Kallah,
Debbie Friedman's Mi Chamocha that leads nicely into Miriam's song (which I
also do, the kids like the story in the song).  On a Shabbat when the
parents are there I also do Shalom Rav, and they sing along with it...

For my Saturday morning group, I created a visual aide to help us go
through the service.  Here in NYC, the Board of Jewish Education has a
great teacher center where you can make lots of different laminated
poster/activity boards, so after one afternoon there I had this great
laminated/velcro "order of the service" poster.  You may want to create one
for Friday night which charts the progress of the service.  Our saturday
morning chart includes: Warm Up, Bar'chu, Sh'ma, Amidah, Torah, Adon
Olam/Closing Song.  Each part of the service is illustrated in a small
picture, which is laminated and has velcro on the back.  Each "part" sticks
on the large poster under its corresponding number (is this making any
sense?). As we come to each part of the service, its picture goes up on the
board.  I will attempt to outline it below:

______________________________________________________________________________
   6            5               4               3               2
        1
 _____     _______     ________      __________     _______       ________
|      |   |      |    |       |     |         |    |      |      |       |
|      |   |      |    |       |     |         |    |      |      |       |
--------   --------    ---------     -----------    --------      ---------
Adon Olam   Torah          Amidah           Sh'ma        Bar'chu
        Warm-up
(or other
closing
song)
______________________________________________________________________________

Only the numbers are fixed, the boxes I so un-gracefully drew are little
pictures illustrating each prayer (eg. the Sh'ma is a big number 1) with
velcro on the back, and the captions below the pictures are also little
pieces of laminated paper with velcro attachments.  The names of the
prayers are written in Hebrew, not transliteration.  There are a number of
ways to use this tool, and i have found it to be very useful! The whole
thing is about 5'wide by 1' tall.

Hope this helps!

-Joanna