Tips & tools to support your homeschooling program.

Spring is such a time of renewal and comes with a burst of energy. Seasonal celebrations give you a point of focus when choosing stories, crafts and activities to do as a family. Celebrations such as Easter offer a beautiful annual rhythm, something that your child looks forward to re-engaging with each year. It's a special experience to choose activities that become family traditions. ​

We encourage families to recognize the passage of time and the seasonal rhythms through festival celebrations.  Festivals provide an opportunity for your community to unite and share wonder, reverence and gratitude.  May Festival celebrates the awakening of the earth, the lengthening of days, and the rebirth of nature around us.  We celebrate this time of growth with joyous song and dance, playful games and a community picnic.

Traditionally May Festivals are celebrated on May 1st, but we have always found that using the early weeks of May to prepare and then holding the festival later in the month works too.  And if you're homeschooling, you can be as flexible as you like.

Here are some ways you can bring a May Festival to your homeschooling community.

• Connect with others in your area if possible, but if it's just your family, that's fine too.
• You can celebrate in your own back yard or at a local park.
• Make May crowns like these ones out of dandelions or these ones out of ​fabric scraps and flowers.
• For extra fun, you can include a picnic lunch as part of your festivities and perhaps you might want to make a May Festival Cake such as this one:

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the Hebrews' liberation from slavery by the great prophet Moses. Moses would not have survived to free his people, had it not been for the cleverness of his sister Miriam. She set him in a basket on the river Nile, and watched over him until the Pharaoh's daughter found him and took him home to be her own son. 

In this way, Moses survived the dangerous times in Egypt, and grew up with a deep compassion for the Jewish people. In his adult years, he fulfilled his destiny to guide the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt, to form a covenant with God through the Ten Commandments. 

Miriam, perhaps the only woman in the bible, who is not referred to as someone's mother or daughter, has, in more recent times, taken a place of honour at the Passover Seder. As Jewish celebrations and rituals become modernized to fit our new levels of awareness, we turn to the women of the Bible stories, choosing to elevate them to places of importance. In modern Jewish rituals, when the Seder, or religious dinner ritual takes place, many families choose to include Miriam as one of the sacred guests. A cup is filled with water, in her honour, and songs and stories are shared to celebrate her strengths. 

What a wonderful time we live in, where we can honour the importance of the feminine, and include it in a ritual that was formed thousands of years ago. 

Here are some ways you can learn more about Miriam and celebrate her as well.

Sing Miriam's Song
A beautiful song depicting the spirit of women now and in ancient days.  Here are the lyrics so you can sing along:​