Limudei Kodesh

The vast majority of our "school" time is spent on Limudei Kodesh.  I include learning Modern Hebrew as part of that because it is something we only do because we are Jewish.  Learning it helps her with davening and other studies.  So I put a great deal of time and effort into finding just the right balance.  So after much thought and consideration, we are launching on a new plan for the upcoming school year.

Thanks to encouragement and suggestions from Adventures in Mamaland, I am starting Chumash with Froggy.  As she is, we are starting with Lech Lecha.  We will be using a collection of homemade worksheets/activities in addition to the great free workbook Mamaland suggested from Bright Beginnings.  

We are taking it nice and slow.  I suspect as time goes on we will do one passuk a week.  But for this very first passuk, we are spending two weeks.  Each day we will practice reading the passuk and do some sort of activity or worksheet for it.  Studying the Chumash will introduce vocabulary and grammar as well as decoding skills. Some may question this slow pace but it is not forever.  The goal is mastery not progress and I want her to truly master the skill and vocabulary.

We are not giving up our other Limudei Kodesh to focus on Chumash.  We still study the weekly parsha using a variety of sources.  We are also working on HWT Hebrew.  And I just ordered the full introductory Migdaolor Program. for reading. 

Some people ask how I can spend so much time on Limudei Kodesh without doing book work all day.  It is easy for us because I do not teach English at all and have not from the beginning.  Froggy learns that on her own because she lives in an environment surrounded by English.  I spend the time on Hebrew that I do because she does not live in Hebrew environment.  If we lived in Israel, I might be able to focus only on Parsha and Middos and let the Hebrew learning come naturally but here it takes work or does not happen.