Pajama Day!

This week in GAN!

Pajamas! Pajamas! Pajamas! The GAN class had a Pajama Day with lots of Hebrew vocabulary games. To start off, we read a few Jewish folk tales and after discussing some of the lessons, we used colored scarves to act out parts of the stories. One folk tale was about crazy King Antonius and his servants:

-One of his servants always brags about her terrific view from his quarters and makes all of the other servants jealous. He himself gets just as jealous hearing all the time about his servant's view, which sounds better than the one from his own bedroom! Confused and angry, he looks at the blueprints of the castle, consults his advisors and still can't figure out how one of his lowly servants has this view. Meanwhile, his servant has been describing this view to all of the people living in the kingdom. Finally, the king sends the servant away on a vacation so that he can sneak into the quarters and see this view for himself. Once he breaks in, he discovers the view is merely of a stone wall - gray and plain. Now even more confused, he asks his servant exactly what's been going on in his head. His servant kindly explains that he makes the best of his view by imaging the rolling waves of the ocean, the green valleys and setting sun. It makes his workday much easier and once he comes home, he enjoys the warmth of a lovely view. Inspired, the king finally takes down the stone wall so that his servants do finally enjoy a beautiful view from their quarters.

With this, we talked about the importance of thinking "outside the box" and making the best of anything, even a gray view. We did vocabulary review with parts of the body and Jewish holidays by labeling charts. We also pinned the vowel on the letter and made different letter sounds and combinations with Alef, Bet, and Resh. 

See you all next week!

Erica

This Week In Gan...

This week's class we finished our Vocabulary Adventure story -- our original, thrilling tale of an Israeli man named George who climbs a mountain to save his brother Eytan (who can talk to animals) from an angry elephant, defeats their evil sister and her lion, and rides a snowmobile. We used vocabulary from this week to complete the story: animals! We practiced all animal vocabulary after the class expressed an interest. 

You can review some of the words. Like, pets: "chatul" is cat and "kelev" is dog. Zoo animals like a lion, "arieh" and a peacock "tavas" would be great costumes for Purim!

Duck = Barvaz

Donkey = Chamor

Wolf = Ze'ev

Fish = Dag

Camel = Gamal

Turkey = Hodu

After drawing and writing the animals, we played a silent zoo: we had to act out an animal from our vocabulary list and guess the animal in Hebrew. Daniel won the acting award for his silent "meduza," Jellyfish! Honorable mentions were Nate the "karnaf," a rhinoceros and Sonya the "dag" fish. 

Hebrew charades is a great way to reinforce vocabulary! Especially when the unit is fun and creative, and all around us! The class is really improving their Hebrew print skills and sounding out words by sight. A new letter this week was "Zayin" which appeared in "Ze'ev" and "Meduza". 

See you next week, and hopefully at the Purim Carnival on March 20th from 9 am to noon! I will be there, too!

Erica

Alef-Bet!

Hello GAN parents!
This week we had a lot of fun in our song session...ask your kids to sing you the "Popsicle Song" or the Alef-Bet!
We also started contributing to our Tzedakah box. We decorated our own and we already had some very generous donations. Those who put in for Tzedakah received "Tzedakah Stars" and those who did not made collages that said, "I will bring Tzedakah next week".

Fifth-Graders Sam and Natalie came in and talked about what Tzedakah mean and the cause we are fundraising for.

We played a great game of "Tov and Lo Tov" this week after reading the story of Moses in the desert with the Families-of-Israel. We discussed the songs they sang, the mistakes they made while Moses was on Mount Sinai for 40 days, and God forgiving them. We ended the day before the tribes crossed into their new home of Israel.

Enjoy the winter break, next time we will be back on the Hebrew Alphabet!

Erica

This is Gan!

To start off, we created Tu Besh'vat collages, since we were snowed out of the holiday last week. We talked about how trees are like family (mishpacha) because many parts make a whole, big part that brings us life and love.

We added our letter this week, 'shin' to the tree as well and have officially mastered vowel sounds so we had time for one quick game of Tov + Lo Tov to show our new assistant morah, Jen.

The second half of class we wrote the script for our class' production of Joseph and His Brothers. Here is the cast of our off-Broadway show:

Joseph - Ella
Jacob - Sonya
Narrator 1 - Gabby
Narrator 2 - Jake
King Potiphar - Jacob C
Jealous Brother 1 - Daniel
Jealous Brother 2 - Nate
Jailer/Slave Buyer - Harry
Reuben - Isaac

We wrote the script and all the lines together. We will be rehearsing and creating our costumes all of next week's class to prepare presenting to Ohabei Shalom at Tefillah! If you have any costume ideas, please have them bring items along to class next week.

Lights! Camera! GAN!

Erica

The Tale of Joseph

This week we reviewed Hebrew terms, people, and places for a big game of Pictionary.
For example, we drew English words out of the hat and one student drew their best representation and the class guessed the Hebrew term. We reviewed family vocabulary and other basic terms like "tov" "lo tov" "toda", etc. Every student had a chance to draw and earn some leftover Chanukah gelt!

We then read from a chapter book, The Tale of Joseph, which tells the story of Joseph and his brothers more in depth than our brief Bible readings. Each chapter a different student played Joseph and we acted out the story scene by scene.

Our Hebrew letter this week was "tet". We recognize a lot of "tet" wrods - tov, talit, toda. Reading, writing and memorizing the Hebrew words gets easier and easier for us each week and we can sound out many of our new vocabulary!

This week's torah portion covers the beginning of the 12 Tribes of Israel and the birth of Moses. Go over what your child's Hebrew name is. What does it mean? Was he/she named after someone important?

We will be discussing Hebrew names after vacation and making our own renditions.
Have a wonderful vacation!

Erica