As usual, your brilliant kiddos blew us away this week. Over the past few days, I’ve watched the Boker (pre-K—1) students pick up the basic mechanics of Hebrew reading and all the Hebrew vowels. Beverly challenged the Erev (2—5) students to all read and sing at least two words of text with trope, and every single one of them did. I spent two days with one Boker kid working on ordering and singing all the letters in the aleph-bet. On the second day, he spent maybe a third the amount of time that he did on the first day completing the task and hardly needed any help finding the correct letters. Here are some other success stories from this week of intensive Hebrew learning.
At one of our Shulchanot Avodah (learning centers) this week, we stuck a dozen or so Hebrew letters to the windows of our big space. Someone called out one of the letters on the windows, and the kiddos raced to find and point to it first. At the beginning of the week, a teacher was usually calling out the letters. By the middle of the week, our students knew the letters well enough that they could run the activity for each other without our help. The joy and excitement with which they played the game make me wonder whether they even realized they were learning a new alphabet in the process.
At another Shulchan Avodah, the Erev students were tasked with translating a pretty long pasuk (verse) from Torah. The ones who completed it worked at it with impressive dedication over the course of several days. After finding all the words in our Hebrew-English dictionaries, they then had the much harder job of figuring out how to swap the grammar and word order into something that made sense in English. These Erev kiddos are well on their way to becoming masters of targum (translation).
