Micrography, Oil Spills, and L'Cha Dodi.

I taught art again last Friday. We made picture for Mothers Day, inspired by Micrography or Microcalligraphy. Micrography is a style, often seen in Jewish art, where text is used to actually create an image. Lines of text are used as lines. Different density of text can be used for shading.
We started by writing a few sentences about Mom. Some of the kids wrote two sentences, some filled a page. Next we used pencil to lightly sketch out an image. The kids then either outlined their images with the text. Some used crayon to add some color, and then traced the letters using sharpies. We then erased the pencil lines. We spent about an hour and fifteen minutes on the project, most of the kids taking almost that entire time to complete it. One of the Moms came up to me and thanked me, saying the picture and the things their child wrote made her cry (happy tears, of course.) I was very proud of how seriously most of the children worked on the project.
Then we had a short Shabbat circle. The kids started the circle by telling Rabbi Aaron a bunch of riddles and jokes. That could have gone on for the entire session so Rabbi Aaron told them to tell him all of the rest of their jokes after Shabbat circle. They then talked about the oil spill. The children had read a book about oil spills, and had a science lab related to oil spills. They had all sorts of information to share about why oil spills are a problem and some of the ways people try to clean them. Rabbi Aaron then talked about the Torah, and how it has no title pages. How do we know when we are moving from one book to the next? Because there is a big space between the last line of one book to the first line of the next book. Where do the books get their Hebrew names? From the first important word in each book.
Then they sang L'cha Dodi, like they do every week. R., who had just returned from Israel, shared that she had been in the courtyard in Tzefat where the song L'cha Dodi was written in the 16th century, and that she sang the song while she was sitting there. Rabbi Aaron pointed out how the author, Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, wrote it as an acrostic poem, putting his name, Slomo ha'Levi, into the first letters of the lines of the song. He held up a siddur to show them where they could find his name.