Shavuot Family Activities at Swiss Cottage Library

Jewish Museum staff member running object handling station.

For May Half Term, we hosted another family day at Swiss Cottage Library. This time, all the activities were about Shavuot. This Jewish holiday celebrates G-d giving the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.

Like last time, our under-5s area was a big hit. The babies and toddlers got the chance to play and draw in a sensory area with different harvest-filled jars to explore.  We chose these jars because Shavuot is a harvest festival.

Sensory play station.

Of course, we also offered activities for the older children. The first activity was a creating a mountain mural inspired by Mount Sinai where Jewish people received the Torah. The children cut and coloured different shapes. Then, they stuck them on a long sheet of paper creating one long mountain scene.

The final activity was making your own story scroll. Because the Torah is a scroll of stories, the children could cut, colour, and stick different Torah imagery to their sheet of paper. We then gave them some beautiful ribbon to tie up their story scroll and take it home. For inspiration, they also got to discover some objects from our handling collection like yads, a model Torah, and rimmonim.

Mount Sinai mural station.

Overall our event ran for 2 hours and we had over 100 visitors. Thank you to everyone who joined us and to Swiss Cottage for giving us the opportunity to use their children’s library for this event.