Ben Porat Yosef “Grandparents and Special Visitors Day” kicked off with junior high programming on Thursday, December 24. Students in grades 6-8 hosted their guests for lunch and then headed to the classrooms to learn together. General studies courses included Ancient Mesopotamia (sixth grade), historical fiction (seventh grade), and the civil rights movement (eighth grade).

In Judaic studies, each class studied the brachot that Yaakov gave to his grandsons in that week’s parshah, Vayechi. The program continued the following day, Friday, December 25, with elementary school grandparents and special visitors joining BPY elementary school students for tefillah and engaging classroom activities. These included interviews, scavenger hunts, games, parashah study and more. Shabbat was the theme of the day for the early childhood Grandparents and Special Visitors program. Early childhood classrooms were bursting with hands-on Shabbat activities, as students and guests worked together on Shabbat-related STEM activities, shaped their own challot, shopped to prepare for Shabbat, prepared their own b’samim and more.