A Tu BiShvat of Seeing

For Tu BiShvat this year at Gesher Jewish Day School, we ran a succesful program to help our students take a closer look at nature. We brought nature inside the school following a clever plan from the book Let the Earth Teach You Torah. Our school is set into a large property of woodland. We gathered many samples of tree branches, twigs, leaves and bark to the kids. Each one chose an item, and set to work examining it carefully. They wrote as detailed a description as they could, getting to know the item as a new friend. In the Middle School, the students also put their samples into a box, switched descriptions and tried to identify the new ...