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Our Catalog: God and Spirituality

Your Students Begin to
Wonder About God Long
Before the 4th Grade

From their earliest years, children begin to wonder about God. Too often, their questions go unanswered.

We teach holidays. We teach history. We teach about the Bible, about our land, and about our language. Yet an awareness of God is often missing from our religious school classes. We teach children how to behave and how to live Jewishly, but sometimes we fail to teach them why. God is "why."

As Jews we have a rich legacy of teaching about the meaning of God. Thousands of years of experience have provided us with real answers to questions children post. What odes it mean to be holy? Why does God allow bad things to happen? What part can young people plan in making our dream of a complete and perfect world come true?

Our children want to achieve an understanding of God and holiness. They want to find a higher meaning for the things and creatures that inhabit our world. And we should want them to achieve this understanding.

Rabbi David J. Wolpe
Author of Teaching Your Children About God

We all recognize the truth in these words. That's why Behrman House offers a complete God and Spirituality Curriculum. Each of these highly interactive publications provides dynamic and age-appropriate text, stories, and activities to engage students in an exploration of Jewish spirituality. The result: a set of materials that can help your students at each state of their spiritual development.

Thinking About God (Grades K-2)
[cover] Let's Discover God
Your youngest students will delight in these 8 four-page folders, each beginning with a motivating poem and full-color photograph. Each folder introduces a single concept, such as God's Creations, God Is One, and Thanking God.

Students engage in a variety of inventive, reflective, and hands-on activities such as thinking about prayer by identifying those things in their lives for which they are grateful, and exploring the concept of b'tzelem Elohim by drawing their own faces. Children also learn basic prayers and blessings, including the Motzi, Sh'ma, and Sheheheyanu, while additional activities bring to life the wonder and variety of the world. Each folder includes an activity that can be sent home and completed as a family.

Developing a Personal Sense of God (Grades 3-4)
[cover] Partners with God
This groundbreaking, full-color book helps children develop a personal understanding of God and holiness even as they learn traditional Jewish perspectives and build a vocabulary for thinking about spirituality.

Using a rich selection of stories from our tradition, creative activities, and over 100 modern photographs and eye-catching illustrations, Partners with God helps children begin to think about issues such as how we know there is a God, what it means to be made in God's image, and how we communication with God through prayer. Beautifully presented, Partners with God offers rich material for both personal reflection and class discussion.

A splendid book!... Knows the mind and the soul of a young child.

Rabbi Harold Kushner
Author of When Children Ask About God

Exploring the Jewish Covenental Relationship (Grades 4-6)
[cover] Living as Partners With God
Building on the concepts of personal faith that are introduced in Partners with God, this volume brings students to an understanding to Jewish community and our covenantal relationship with God.

Starting from the birth of the Jewish nation, students meet the heroes of the Jewish people who have demonstrated through their actions how to live a Jewish life and build a Jewish community. The book explores concepts such as the importance of the mitzvot, the messages of the prophets, how we can keep God's world in good repair, and the significance of Jewish sacred time.

Living the Mitzvot (Grades 7-9)
[cover] Making a Difference: Putting Jewish Spirituality into Action, One Mitzvah at a Time
An action-based view of Jewish spirituality, this book helps pre-teens and teens put into practice the concepts and values introduced earlier in the curriculum. Enriched by over 130 photographs and illustrations that speak to the sensibilities of today's young adults, the text offers practical, age-appropriate suggestions for living out our spirituality and for honoring the covenantal relationship. Both ethical and ritual mitzvot, such as Rodef Shalom, Tzedakah, Kashrut, and Prayer, are included, making the book rich with values and mitzvah projects for bar and bat mitzvah students and beyond!


A teacher's guide is available for each book to provide enrichment, background information, and clear and effective techniques for leading class discussion, as well as support that will help even the most inexperienced teachers develop ease and confidence with the subject matter.






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