Time to Make Rosh Hashanah Cards

The first night of Rosh Hashanah is Wednesday, September 4^th.

So now’s the perfect time to make Jewish New Year cards with your kids.

Send them to grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends – they’ll love ‘em!

Creating Jewish New Year cards with young children

We really like reinforcing two key concepts of Rosh Hashanah in card creation:

• Round – round challah, round apples, hope for a round (full) year
• Sweet – apples dipped in honey, honey cake, teiglach.
  

#1  You can take this wonderful art idea and apply it to Rosh Hashanah. Just dip paper cups into a dark-colored paint, then press onto a sheet of paper to create a pattern. The circles can be overlapping or not – up to the artist. As an added step, you can let that dry, then use different colors of paint to draw inside the circles.

#2 I’m a glue stick nut. And our toddler grandson loves taking shapes that I’ve cut out of multiple colors of construction paper and gluing them into highly textured, multi-layered patterns. He then takes brightly colored markers and adds a drawing. Perfect as a new year’s card! For younger artists, fold a sheet of 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of construction in half. This leaves a good-sized 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 card front for gluing and coloring. Older artists are fine with a smaller size surface.
#3 A super easy approach that allows even your toddlers to make their own creations is to buy a batch of round stickers in various sizes and colors – like the ones they have at office supply stores. A quick search on staples.com reveals a wonderful assortment of both colors – purple, red, orange, pink, green, including neons – and sizes (1/2”, 1”, 2”). Lots of color. Virtually no clean-up required.

#4 Want more recognizable images? Here are 20+ images you can use to Jewish Near Year Cards – Inspiration for Young Artists – a mix of four-color images and ready-to-color black and white illustrations. We chose lots of “round” pictures (circles, balls, apples, sun) and “sweet” images (doughnuts, cake, cupcake, honey).

Supplying your older artists 

For more advanced artists, just provide paper (construction paper, photocopy paper in assorted colors) and markers. Ramp it up with stickers and glitter pens.  Collage creation from magazine photos is also fun.

Need Rosh Hashanah images to inspire your more independent artists? Classic symbols include the shofar, apples, honey, pomegranates, round challah, and Jewish stars.

Typical New Year Greetings

If your kids are pre-writers, you can help add the wishes. Here are three traditional Rosh Hashanah greetings:

Wishing you a sweet, health year!

May your year be good and sweet.

Wishing you and yours a joyous New Year.

 More Rosh Hashanah ideas

See our Rosh Hashanah Pinterest page for even more ideas.

Save art for the sukkah

Even if you don’t plan to mail your new year card creations, save them to decorate a real sukkah – or a pseudo sukkah. (We’ll talk about that in a September post.)

Wishing a special welcome to our new readers! And to everyone, if there’s something you’d like us to talk about, just shoot me an email to [email protected]