Your Guide to Making a Clay Dreidel

The dreidel is a four-sided top used to play a simple and fun game of chance. Each side of the top has a different Hebrew letter on it. These letters represent "Nes Gadol Haya Sham" which means, "A great miracle happened there." All of the letters have different meanings as well. Just outside of Israel, dreidels have the letters nun, gimel, hay and shin.

The letters on the dreidel stand for the Yiddish words that tell the instructions of the game. The Jewish people believe that the dreidel also represents the four kingdoms, Babylon, Persian, Greece and Rome spinning around the center.

Each player starts the game with ten to twenty tokens (chocolate gelt coins, peanuts, candies, raisins, or any other small items you choose to use). If you don't want to use tokens you can play the game by keeping score with points. To begin all players need to put in a token in the middle. Then each player takes a turn to spin the dreidel, you then act according to the letter that is facing up when the dreidel falls to the table.

Now that you know how to play, lets learn how to make a homemade dreidel. You can make a dreidel out of several different materials like paper, cardboard and wood, but I prefer to use a good resilient material like clay. This process is more involved, but is well worth it.

Materials you will need

• Clay (found at any craft store)
• Cube clay mold (found at any craft store)
• Pyramid clay mold (found at any craft store)
• Wood dowel

Fill the cube mold with your clay and smooth out the exposed surface. Before the clay dries, take it out of the cube mold and stick the wood dowel into one of the faces. Push the dowel all the way through to the opposite face of the cube of clay. Make sure that you insert the dowel at a perfect 90-degree angle and centered correctly. That is the most challenging part of making the dreidel, but if done improperly, the dreidel will not spin right. Now take the pyramid mold and fill it with clay and smooth out the exposed surface as before. Before your clay has dried, remove it from the mold and place the flat side of the pyramid to the bottom of the cube that has the dowel sticking out of it. Make sure that the pyramid is centered as you push it on the cube. Don't forget your letters! You can carve them right into the clay or paint them on with paint or markers. Now that you have made your dreidel, you are ready to play the game. Enjoy playing!

References for this article came from enchantedlearning.com and bry-backmanor.org