Passover is one of the major Jewish holidays and one of the three pilgrimage festivals in the faith. It celebrates the Biblical story of the Israelites and their escape from Egypt. Those who celebrate host a special meal called a seder, and recite traditional prayers. To help teach your students more about this religious holiday, we’ve curated a group of resources to make it easy to bring Passover lessons to your classroom:

• Celebrating Passover
• Religious celebrations in April

Discover Passover history and traditions

Build students’ background knowledge about Passover and other spring holidays, and start discussions about diverse perspectives with these resources:

[Celebrating Passover](id-ela)

Help students learn more about the holiday that celebrates the end of Jewish enslavement in ancient Egypt:

• Read about the history of Passover, discover what the term means, and explore common Passover traditions like avoiding all leavened foods.
• Bust five common myths about the Passover holiday and the traditional Seder meal.
• Have students complete quizzes about Passover to check their comprehension and knowledge of the topic.

[Religious celebrations in April] (id-ss)

Give your students an overview of the histories and traditions of various religious celebrations that happen during April:

• Discover the similarities and differences among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holidays like Passover, Easter, Ramadan, and Eid al-Fitr.
• Break students into jigsaw groups and assign each group a holiday to study and create a presentation for the class.
• Have students share their presentations with the class using the information from this text set and the others mentioned in this post related to their holiday. Encourage the listeners to ask questions and take notes about information they find interesting.

Add more skills practice to your Passover activities

Did you know it’s easy to add additional skills practice to any Newsela lesson with Newsela ELA? With just one search, you can select which skills you want to teach in the classroom and find articles that match your topic! Plus, with skill labels on each article, get a quick overview of which ones fit your lesson best. Ready to give it a try? Log into your Newsela account to see how it works!