Lionden Landing

Our family was invited to participate in a pilot program through the JCC that pairs American and Israeli families.  The program emphasizes that all the families, both American and Israeli, are under "the same moon".   The Israeli families are from our sister region, Beit Shemash,about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Froggy is excited about it. Right before Shavuot, we wrote our third letter to our match family telling them all about our favorite holidays and we celebrate them here as directed by the book. Each page of the book shows way in which are similar and different.  It suggests a topic for the letter and gives a place to record/ keep the letter from the partner family.  We have received two letters so far from our partner family.  He is an only child as well and lives on a kibbutz with his mom.  He will be in first grade in the Fall.  I think it will be super neat to hear his perspective on the holidays. This is the Israeli g...

Froggy is so proud of being one of the "big kids" and leaders  when the younger grades come in for Khelliah Tefillah each Sunday.  They do Havdalah as well and I am not sure what else.

For over a year and half, we have been slowly working our way through the Bright Beginnings Chumash Workbook and Parsha Lech Lecha.  My only serious complaint about the book is that it only covers the first three aliyot and there is no follow up workbook. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we finally finished the workbook completing with competence and fluency the last passuk. This week, we continued working our turtle pace through Lech Lecha with a new technique.  With this new method, we are working more on comprehension of the sentences and less on grammar since Froggy has a pretty good handle on the basics. I copied the next passuk from this website (chosen specifically because I can cut and paste an individual passuk in a readable, editable fashion) to make her a special worksheet.  Froggy reads through it once in Hebrew without commentary or stopping.  Then we go back and work through it word by word.  All the words Froggy can easily identify/transl...

I haven't posted a book review in awhile and there are so many good ones I am excited about.  First my books. I am currently reading Raising Lifelong Learners.  It is really geared towards someone with younger children.  Still in addition to validating lots of the choices, we made with Froggy as a toddler, it does offer guidance and suggestions for the middle childhood years.  I recommend it for every parent especially homeschoolers. The other new book I am excited about is my Interlinear Chumash.  I have struggled long and hard during services to follow along with the Torah reading.  I have had to choose, either follow the Hebrew or read the English.  Now I don't have to choose any more.  My new Chumash has the translation directly under each word so I can read both at the same time.  It will actually help me improve my Hebrew as well as making the Torah reading section of services more meaningful.  Froggy is thrilled with a co...

Given that it is summer, our schooling is a bit erratic.  We are making progress with the Shema but it is very very slow.  I just made the latest worksheet for Froggy.  Each time we do it (which should be every week but is not) I add a line in Hebrew.  I keep all the previous lines since we are working on memorization.  Only the new line is translated and only the new line is used for copy work. 

Now that Froggy is getting more capable with her reading in Hebrew, we are working on actually reading the tefillah during davening rather than reciting/singing from memory.  We are also working on learning the meaning of the prayers.  Right now, we are working the second paragraph of the Shema.   We are using the English for her copy work. Copywork is a major component of the Charlotte Mason style yet it seemed not to fit until now.  It was not meaningful and thus I would let it slide.  By combining Tefillah practice and copywork, I have made it important.  That does not mean fun though.  It is currently the most fraught item during our school time.  Reading the Hebrew and learning the prayers are great.  Unfortunately doing the printing is miserable

I think we have finally turned a corner with our Chumash study.  Abou t two months ago , I ordered flashcards for Froggy and a real workbook. We backtracked a bit and redid several passukim to get a better handle on them. We took some break due to illness and chaos but we also changed how we work on our Chumash focusing on the flashcards and on fluency. We just finished Passuk ט and Froggy was able to read it fluenly and with confidence match all the vocabulary words up to this point.  I made her a new color worksheet to go with the new Passuk for the week.  Froggy loves it when I make these worksheets for her.  They are all possible thanks to the guidance of Adventures in Mamaland .  Her worksheets are much better but mine are improving.   Looking ahead, the new "required" vocabulary becomes less as many of the words are already familiar. As of this week, we have already learned 24 out of the possible 35 flashcards.  Yet we have not e...

I recently purchased flashcards for both our Ivrit curriculum and our Chumash program.  I had been trying to work without them because I hated flashcards as a child and wanted to spare Froggy that.  With her Ivrit Flashcards , we play a version of charades.  These cards disappointed me when they showed up.  They include only the word, no pictures as exist in the text. They are plain and boring.  I expected Froggy to hate them.  I have pulled out all the verbs for the first half of the book.  I place the cards Ivrit side up. We take turns reading the Ivrit and then acting out the verb for the other person to guess.  The actor can look at the English but tries not to.  The actor also has to use the verb in a complete Ivrit sentence.  Froggy  loves this game so much that she practically begs for it.  She wants to do it more than once a day.  It is also getting us using our limited Ivrit even outside of the game.  I cal...

We love our new Shalom Ivrit books.  Froggy really likes the characters.  We are only on Chapter 3 and moving very slowly due to all the Chagim. But it seems to be working.  It is just the right mix of English and Hebrew for our family.  It is by far better than most Hebrew books for non-Hebrew teachers in that the student actually read dialogue in Hebrew.  And I know it is working because Froggy will use the new vocabulary randomly during the course of her day.

Froggy's Shalom Ivrit books arrived today.  They look wonderful.  They are super basic and easy with a great mix of Hebrew and English.  The teachers guide is in English and walks the teacher (written for a classroom setting) through every single tiny baby step in presenting the lesson.  It is just what I need.  I cannot wait for tomorrow morning to come so Froggy and I can jump right in.  p.s - I promise we do subjects other than Hebrew and I will talk about them again soon. :)

Okay so I have officially given up on Migdalor.  Without being able to use the Teacher's Guide, I just cannot make effective use of the resources. Yesterday I sent a letter to Berhman House asking for advice.  I am trying to decide between two of their products.  We are looking at Shalom Ivrit and Kadima   Both programs come with music, flash cards and teachers guides.  Unfortunately from the website I cannot tell any real differences between the products which makes choosing extremely difficult. In my letter, I explained our situation and provided background on Froggy including age and ability level.  People have spoken well of the customer service they have received from the company so I am hopeful that I will receive good advice.  I need to because this is my last hope of finding a decent program. ***UPDATE*** They responded very promptly this morning and recommended Shalom Ivrit.  I have ordered it.  I hope this is the last time I...

Thank goodness we are working on learning Chumash because all of our regular Hebrew reading programs are failures.  I cannot find a single one that works well for an English speaking parent. On the recommendation of Adventures in Mamaland, we ordered the Migdalor Program for Kindergarten.  It came just before we moved.  I pulled the teacher's guide to review and somehow lost it during the move further delaying our start. So I finally found the teacher's guide and started going through it.  Yes parts of the guide are in English but all of the actual instruction on how to teach the program is in Hebrew.  This does not real help the English speaking parent much.  The program would probably fantastic for a Hebrew speaker or a school.  It is very detailed in how to teach.  We have not given up on it completely and we are struggling through but neither one of us really wants to do it because it is difficult. 

Our tadpoles are still alive despite some very dubious care.  We went to check on them and found that one had sprouted teeny tiny legs.  It was amazing how tiny the legs were, so tiny that at first I thought it was a smudge of dirt clinging to him. Froggy suggested we document the moment in our journals.  So we did.  It was lots of fun watching Froggy making multicolored tadpoles. Continuing our Frog theme, we completed a fun worksheet from Adventures in Mamaland about the life cycle of the Frog.  Froggy was thrilled with the opportunity to learn the Hebrew names for her current passion.  To tie everything together we made Froggy's pride and joy - a poster of the life cycle.   I drew the shapes which Froggy cut out.   Then she pasted them next to the appropriate label I had written.  Then she decorated them.  Complete with googly eyes because "googly eyes make everything better."

I just have to crow!! I finally did it.  With some help from Jennifer at Adventures in Mamaland , I made my first copy worksheet for Froggy.  It is not as pretty with graphics and everything like hers are but it does what I need it to do. We are starting a unit studying the meaning of our prayers as well as working on Hebrew reading and pronunciation.  Our first prayer is Ashrei.  I chose this because it is the one she struggles with the most as well as the one she understand the meaning/purpose of the most as well. You can download it here .

Thanks to a recommendation from Adventures in MamaLand , I got the beginning series of Sarah and David for Froggy.  When I got the materials in the mail, I was extremely disappointed. The Alef-Bet storybook was cute but there were no activities to do with it.  The cd is the book being read verbatim.  The reading primers follow the same basic formula as all the other primers I have seen with repetitive nonsense syllables. And Froggy loves it all.  We listen to the cd in the car.  She loves the funny descriptions of the letters.  I do not know if they are helping her remember the differences but it is making studying the letters fun for her.  With all the battles we had with sounding things out in English, I thought the primers would be a battle but Froggy cannot wait to get to them.  She is sounding out syllables and loving it.   This is never going to make her fluent in Hebrew but maybe if she is a confident reading with vowels early...

Yesterday was Rosh Chodesh Adar I.  Why Adar I?  Because this is Shanah Me'uberet (literally a pregnant year).  In English we call it a leap year.  Froggy was very eager when she saw that we were entering Adar that Purim was just around the corner.  She was more than a little disappointed to learn that even though this is Adar I, Purim is still over a month away.  This is Froggy's first Shanah Me'uberet so it took some explaining as to how Adar I came to being and how it is different from Adar II In the fourth century, Hillel II established a fixed calendar with a 19 year cycle.  The cycle is very complicated to remember until you look at it musically. The pattern of leap years follows the major scale: for each whole step there are two regular years and a leap year; for each half-step there is one regular year and a leap year. I explained the process particularly with the scale because I find that the most fascinating.  What boggled her an...

I finally got my act together and synergized our learning and touch on every single subject with the same topic.  Our letter for the week is פ .  We chose פרפר which means butterfly as our word for the week.  Yes it is early in the year to be studying butterflies but one accepts the letters as they come.    A friend invited us to visit the Smithsonian Butterfly Garden with them but unfortunately it did not work out and we missed going.  Instead we took a virtual tour and read several butterfly books We read (actually reread) From Catepillar to Butterfly .  We first read this book last year when we hatched our own catepillars. Thanks to  Adventures In Mama-Land I even had a copywork sheet ready to run through the life cycle and bring writing/spelling practice to the mix. First Froggy practiced drawing a butterfly using the step by step approach in Things Girls Love .  This is working better for us than the Draw Write Now books did....

Froggy and I have been studying Hebrew together for awhile now and I have found that it works best when presented repeatedly in multiple formats but also if it is relevant to her everyday life.  We do "vocabulary words" that go with her letter of the week but these do not stay with her past the week for the most part. What does work is when we use those words regularly.  She knows her colors and most body parts and family because we use those words.  So now we have started with the days of week, the months of the year and a few weather terms.  The way we do this is very "preschool" style with circle time and lots of singing and a big wall calendar and weather station.  And Froggy is having a blast.  And we are both learning.

About six to eight months ago, I stumbled across what I thought would be a terrific book, Sing Play Create to use with Froggy at the library.  I brought it home and tried valiantly to entice her into the activities.  No joy.  She just was not ready for it.  So back to the library it went. Flash forward to present and Froggy is trying to draw more and actively interested in writing.  We went back to the library and checked out the book again. This time it was a huge hit.  For our first activity, I started with the zoo section since we are planning a trip to the zoo this weekend.  We read The Saggy Baggy Elephant  which we enjoyed mostly because it was a story I remember reading as very little person rather than for the story itself. And then Froggy drew her very own elephant on the brand new story book paper she received for her birthday from Grandma and Grandpa following the step by step guide in Sing Play Create . We also played trunk pus...

Froggy is clearly struggling with her Alef Bet. And I had been struggling with how to help her until I was inspired by The Petersons. Now we are doing a very preschool- esque letter of the week system even though Froggy is no longer a preschooler. This week we started with Bet even though it is not the first letter. Since our focus is sounds I did not want to start with silent Alef. I made a big Bet and Froggy colored it in. Froggy practiced tracing Bets every single day all week. She got pretty good at it as well. We built bayit out of legos. We drew storms and danced with the thunder and baruk . The best part is tying in the values. Our value is נרוכ or blessed. We talked about how we are blessed and how important it is to thank Hashem for all our blessings through the brachot each day. Froggy's copy work for Handwriting was BLESSED. I love being able to tie everything together.