3 Fun and Easy Activites to Help You Celebrate Purim at Home with Your Children

by Carla Goldberg, Early Childhood Director

We all know that Purim is going to look different this year. There will be no big Purim parties, carnivals, costume parades and crazy fun for adults and children. What can you create at home that still celebrates the essence of the holiday? Following are some fun, DIY activities that explore the themes of Purim but also engage children in a way that promotes their development:

1. Create your own greggors. Part of the fun of Purim is making noise. Pose the challenge of how many different ways your family can come up with to create a greggor. Provide the children with paper plates, toilet paper tubes, empty plastic bottles and containers, colored tape and some materials to fill them with, such as rice or beans. After making the greggors, hold a vote on which one makes the loudest noise.
    
   
2. Explore emotions. Learning to understand emotions is important developmental learning for children. The Purim story is filled with emotions as the characters experience feeling happy, sad, afraid, surprised, scared, and brave, and it thus provides an excellent vehicle to talk about different emotions. Here are some ideas on how to do this:
• Have your child create puppets showing the different emotions she is feeling. Those puppets could even be two-sided to show different emotions. 
• Play “emotions charades” with one of you acting out different emotions while the others guess what the actor is feeling.  
• Put on music and dance, aiming to express the different emotions through movement.


3. Study, draw and build castles. Purim is a story about a king and queen, and so it is an apt time to learn more about where these royals live.
• Do some research with your child about what castles look like around the world. It is so interesting to see the different architectural styles. 
• Have your child draw these different castles. I like to give the child just a black marker, so that he concentrates on the details of the castle rather than the colors. 
• After drawing the castle, try to build it using different materials. See what you can find around the house that you could use to build: chopsticks, corks, buttons, sea shells, bottle caps, cardboard boxes and lids, plastic containers and lids, and ribbons. These loose parts allow your child to really tap into his creative side, and it’s wonderful to see what they can come up with! 
• Build an ice castle. Get a bag of ice from the grocery store, or empty your icemaker. You’ll also need a box of salt, a plastic tub, and some food coloring or water colors. Have your child build with the ice functioning as bricks, and the salt, which serves as mortar. Then use the food coloring or water colors to paint the castle. You can also make ice shapes by freezing water in different containers, and then use them to add to your castle’s creation. 

I hope that you can find ways to spread joy during this Purim season. All of these ideas are simple and can be done with children of varying ages. Most importantly, have fun, laugh, explore, and celebrate Adar!