For Hanukkah this year, the Water Zombies made their own menorah. We started off by learning what a kosher menorah would need — it would need the candles to be level, except the shamash which should be distinct. Other than that, we had complete freedom to design our classroom menorah.

We looked at other homemade menorahs for inspiration, writing down what we noticed about them, what they had in common, what they reminded us of. We had some very fanciful ideas about what kind of material we could use (concrete and metal were very popular) but the children realized those might not be realistic and settled on clay with decorations.

Next, we talked to the children about how a big project needs committees because not everyone can do every job. We came up with which committees we would need: planning, glitter, clay, decoration, and candles/lighting source. We used our job sticks to pull names and the children were able to choose their committee. It was a Hanukkah miracle that everyone got their first choice!

The planning committee got started on designing the menorah. Each drew their own ideas and then we looked at them together to see common elements. We knew we wanted to work with clay and all three were drawn to the round menorahs. Together, they came up with this design:

The clay committee was next! First, they practiced with play dough before moving on to air dry clay. It was tricky following a plan when they wanted to make whatever they wanted but we talked about how this was a team menorah and we all had our jobs to do.

Our dedicated glitter committee – they took the job very seriously and thought it was hilarious that teacher Nicole was the only person to spill glitter!

The decoration committee used the leftover decorations from our Hanukkah party to decorate the menorah.

Due to absences, our candle committee was never able to meet. Instead of making something to represent candles, we decided to use the tea lights that we use at lunch. Today, since we had eight students, we thought it would be nice to light all the candles. Each child took a turn switching on a candle after I lit up the shamash.

One child said, it was “so so beautiful!” Our menorah project served as a great introduction to project based learning and we have some lessons that will carry over into our architecture exploration — drawing plans, constructing based on those plans, having a division of labor, and an end product. The children all took enormous pride in their menorah and they absolutely should be impressed with their work! Happy Hanukkah!