High Holidays 2022/5783 Shelfie + Starter Activities

With Rosh Hashanah just a little over a month away, we set up our High Holidays 2022/5783 Shelfie and invited the kids to learn, explore, and play with all things High Holidays!!

Remember the beauty of shelfies–grab what you have on hand or can easily put together, display in an inviting way, and just let your kiddos explore! There’s no right or wrong way to set one up. I focused on activities I thought would be interesting for my own kids, based on their interests, age, and developmental stages. I hope you’ll find some inspiration! I’d love to see your shelfies too!!

What You’ll Need

• Your favorite High Holiday books (check out our recommendations here!)
• Your favorite High Holiday arts, crafts, toy sets, and activities that you already own and/or look below to see if any of ours inspire you to create similar ones!

Putting It Together

Here is the list of activities that I set up. Get inspired or grab whatever of your own! I also plan to add new activities as we create them to this High Holidays Shelfie.

1. High Holidays Book Box + Bingo
2. Rosh Hashanah Montessori-Style 3 Part Cards
3. Yom Kippur Montessori-Style 3 Part Cards
4. Simanim Garland
5. Pretend Beehive Play
6. Apple Chunkies Decorations
7. Apple Tray with Wooden Apples
8. Rosh Hashanah Play Set
9. Birthday Cake
10. Apple Counting Board
11. Basket of Shofrot
12. Apple Pom Pom Picking
13. Tray of High Holiday Symbols
14. Beehive High Holiday Candleholders
15. Beehive Shelves
16. Wooden DIY Bees

Finished & Loving It!

High Holidays Book Box + Bingo

As you may know, I love kicking off our holidays by gathering all our holiday books, storing them in a themed book box, and inviting the kids to play some reading bingo challenge to match symbols, themes and events of the holiday in the books we love to read. 

The full how-to for the book box can be found here. And don’t forget to print your free copy of the bingo printable here! Such a fun way to learn about and review the holidays.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Montessori 3-Part Cards

Another wonderful way to either introduce or review the holidays is with our Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Three Part Cards! These cards are a quick way to learn about the holidays and also encourage some review and recall by having the kids match the cards. 

Simanim Garland

We started doing a Rosh Hashanah seder only a few years ago. I loved the idea of intentionally bringing more symbolic foods to our celebration. Special symbolic foods is definitely a Jewish tradition! Since then I’ve made sure to review the simanim with my kids each year so they feel prepared when we read our Rosh Hashanah seder Haggadah. 

To help supplement this learning, this year we made this lovely simanim garland. I love that it combines process art with a beautiful finished product. And the process art was a new-to-us method that was so so simple and cool!

Pretend Beehive Play

I love creating opportunities for creative imaginary play. This beekeeper box was super easy to make. I painted a box white, cut some cardboard, glued bubble wrap to the cardboard and painted those inserts yellow. Now the kids have the option to be pretend beekeepers tending their beehive box by carefully pulling out the honey sheets. So fun! 

Apple Chunkies Decorations

Squee! I’m in love with these new apple chunkie decorations! Just in this last year Woodpeckers Crafts (use WithLoveIma5 for a discount!) launched a whole product line called chunkies. They are thick wooden cut outs that stand on their own. Perfect for some holiday decorations and invitations to play!

I decorated these apple chunkies with a plain side then a cool tape resist different color shades on the other side. I’m excited to see the kids flip them back and forth and enjoy playing however they want with them. 

I created the honey chunkie for another activity last year. Isn’t it wonderful to be able to use decorations for more than one holiday?!

Apple Tray with Wooden Apples

I treated myself to this new wooden apple tray this year. For the shelfie, I kept it simple: colored wooden apples on the tray. The presentation may be simple, but there are already opportunities for creative exploration: pretend food/serving play, a counting experience, and more! 

My kindergartener loved stacking the wooden apples. These apples are from Woodpeckers Crafts (use WithLoveIma5 for a discount!) and are already pre-painted, making it such a cheap and easy item to use in your Rosh Hashanah play! They don’t come with stems which also makes them easy to use for stacking.

And of course this tray has lots of opportunities for sensory play this next month, yay!

Rosh Hashanah Play Set

This play set is another lovely invitation to explore some of the traditional holiday symbols and items however the kids want to. Setting it on the shelf not only acts as a decoration, but also as holiday review and, of course, an invitation to play!

Birthday Cake

A super easy way to remind the kiddos that this holiday celebrates the birthday of the world is with some kind of birthday decoration or play set. I had this wooden birthday cake in our play food bin and thought it was the perfect item to help them remember this concept and act as an open ended invitation to play.

Apple Counting Board

I made this apple counting board years ago, see the full post here. It was simple to make, with just a few fiddly gluing on bits. But the finished product made that extra effort worth it—it’s a super inviting counting board that my older daughter loved to use to practice counting (and connect to Rosh Hashanah, yay!). Now that my third is entering kindergarten I thought he might like to explore these math concepts with a Rosh Hashanah twist too!

Basket of Shofrot

You can’t celebrate the High Holidays without blowing a shofar (or three!)! I added some plastic shofrot to this basket and kept our real shofar safe on the high shelf. If you guessed the kids’ favorite part of the shelfie was blowing (constantly!) on these shofrot, you’re right!

Last year I also did a beautiful Shofar Exploratory Activity that allowed the kids to touch, look and explore our real shofar and learn more about what shofrot are, how they are made, and the special sounds they make during Elul and the High Holidays.

Apple Pom Pom Picking

I plan to use this little Apple Pom Pom Picking DIY later in the month but there’s no harm setting it out now too. It lets the kids practice their fine motor skills, cause and effect, and review the significance of apples and the tradition of apple picking to the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

Tray of High Holiday Symbols

I saved these High Holiday symbols from our High Holidays I Spy Sensory Bin last year. I put them out on a tray for the kids to look at, touch, manipulate and explore. Super simple but still lots of learning!

Beehive High Holiday Candleholders

This was a favorite new craft my daughter and I did earlier today. I love how they turned out and I can’t wait for them to be on our Rosh Hashanah seder table. Full post on this craft coming soon!

Beehive Shelves

Aren’t these little beehive shelves adorable? I bought them awhile ago from Woodpeckers Crafts (use WithLoveIma5 for a discount!) knowing that I would use them for Rosh Hashanah, but I have used them as activity trays so often since they’ve arrived. They are practical and also are a cute decoration.

Wooden DIY Bees

These are another favorite new craft this year. I have hands-on play plans for these little bees (with an accompanying post, of course!) but for today I just set them up as a sweet decoration. I bought the wooden beads from Woodpeckers Crafts (use WithLoveIma5 for a discount!). Then you just need paint, a glue gun and a sharpie to create your own sweet buzzing bees!

Just the beginning …

We had such a great time with all these starter activities! And these are truly starter activities, just the beginning of our learning about the traditions and celebrations that relate to the High Holidays.

I have lots of ideas planned for the next month so make sure to check back (or subscribe!!) but so much learning and fun already happened just in this afternoon and with these few shelves!

We have a whole page dedicated to the High Holidays, our High Holidays Hub. Check it out! It includes some of the High Holidays activities we do this year, as well as the activities we’ve done in previous years.

And don’t forget our Rosh Hashanah Montessori-Style 3 Part Cards, our Yom Kippur Montessori-Style 3 Part Cards, or the High Holidays Montessori-Style 3 Part Card Bundle, all a wonderful way to introduce High Holidays!

The following sites are amazing resources for learning more about this holiday:

PJ Library: High Holidays

Reform Judaism: High Holidays

BimBam: High Holidays

Chag Sameach!!

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