Using Kavanah Cards
How do you use your Kavanah Cards? I'd love to hear your Kavanah Card ideas, favorite rituals, and stories, so please email me.
For Educators
(many of these activities are appropriate for Family Educators and Adult Educators as well as those teaching school age students.)- Pick a Kavanah of the Day, teaching the word and discussing examples. More advanced students can learn other words related to the Hebrew root.Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
- Kavanah Cards are very tactile as well as visual, and perfect to give to the students who finish projects ahead of the others. They will enjoy playing with them and learning without noticing!Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer
- Arrange the Kavanah Cards in various categories: shortest words, by colors, horizontal and vertical. Some of the designs fit together, like puzzle pieces.
- Write midrashim about how the focal words and texts connect. For example, Histapkut/having enough is paired with “who satisfies all living things.” What does it mean to be satisfied? Are people ever satisfied? If God satisfies every living thing, why do people go hungry?
- Play Kavanah Card Charades. Perhaps some of the hand-gestures can be incorporated into your classroom conversations! Sign language is a wonderful reinforcer of concepts.
- Using the Kavanah Card set as a model, create your own Kavanah Cards. You could give students a list of qualities and let them pick. This is a great family activity, too.
- For a teenage group, have each student pick his/her personal mantra of two or three Kavanot which are most central to them. Write about or discuss their choices — Which are most central to pass on to the next generation? Which does the world need most?Anna Rosenfield
- Teaching grammar? Kavanah Cards’ focal words are all nouns. Lay them out, categorize them, and examine the various mishkalim/patterns of noun construction.Marga Hirsch
- Compare and contrast the Kavanah Card acrostic with other liturgical/poetic acrostics such as Ashrei or the She’arim of the Neilah service in the Harlow Machzor, (also featured in the illustrations of the Yom Kippur chapter of The Jewish Holidays by Michael Strassfeld and illustrated by Betsy Teutsch, Kavanah Card creator.)Marga Hirsch
- For an advanced group, have a kavanah text scavenger hunt. The texts are all taken from liturgy but out of context their sources are difficult to identify!Rabbi Reena Spicehandler