Ahhhh, the classic game of gambling…. as a part of our study of Hanukkah today our class split into small groups and played a Jewish children’s game, Dreidel. This game is played with a wooden top that has four Jewish letters on each side. Nun, gimmel, hay, and shin, each one of these letters has a meaning as shown above, and all of these letters combined means “a great miracle happened there.”

Above is a short video of some of our boys playing Dreidel. This is a game with simple rules. Each player has ten coins/tokens, and each player places one coin in the center (pot) before anyone begins a turn. Once everyone’s coins are in each player takes turns spinning the Dreidel, when the Dreidel stops on a letter the player then must follow what that letter says. Example: nun = no coins received, gimmel = take all the coins in the pot, hay = take half of the coins in the pot, shin = place one coin in the pot.

Mr. McClung

2 thoughts on “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel…..”

  1. You could make this into a probability assignment for math! Then you could create a graph or table to show what you found. Think of all the math things you could do!

  2. Great point, we have already incorporated fractions too by using menorahs….so many extension for this lesson, wish we had more time to spend on it.

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