Sukkot

Sukkot starts tomorrow evening so ofcourse many of our books this week revolved around the holiday.

One of our favorites from since Froggy was old enough to listen to stories is Tamar's Sukkah. This story is such a favorite of ours that I chose it to dramatize for the "storytime" during TotShabbat this Saturday. It is fun story about how Tamar prepares her sukkah for the holiday. It has a repetitive building style that makes it great for young children. That all the characters are children sharing and helping each other makes it even better.

One of our new favorites this year is The Big Sukkah. It takes place ages ago in a small village in "the old country." The main couple has a tiny one room cottage too small to entertain. But they build a big sukkah and get to invite all the family for Sukkot.

Well of course we did lots of different art projects related to Sukkot since we had to decorate our family sukkah. We painted lanterns to hang and had tons of fun. Unfortunately the lantern part did not work so well so they never made it into the sukkah.
But Froggy's favorite of the week was when she got to make her very own small sukkah.

We took a shoe box and covered it with construction paper

Then Froggy decorated it.

Then we gave it a roof frame made of coffee stirrers. The directions said use straws but we had stirrers in abundance and did not have any straws.

Then we added the leaves and branches to form roof itself. It was fun trying to peer from the inside out to make sure "we could see the sun peeking at us through the roof"

Once it was done, Froggy took it and her figurines and played Sukkah inside our sukkah. All the princesses came for the holiday and took turns shaking the lulav. It was so cute to watch. I was laughing so hard I forgot all about taking pictures.