Grade K - Gan Class Update 4-30-17

Hello Gan Class Families!

I hope you had a lovely Passover and a restful April break! 

Spring has spring and as is always the case, our year together is quickly coming to a close.  It is crazy to think about how much the Gan Class students have grown over the year.  Today's class really highlighted that for me.

We started with Tefilah with the Aleph Class.  Because we were in the classroom today, students did not have their own individual books.  Despite this, I was amazed at all of the prayers the students know by heart. Students were able to share the order of the prayers in the service and the meaning of many of them as well.

Our summaries of our Torah stories each week are gaining more detail and it is great to see more students eager to share something they know about each story.  Today we illustrated our newest story where Abraham and Sarah have a child named Isaac even though they think they are too old to have children.  Next week we will learn more about Isaac.

There are only a few new letters to learn and this week the letters were gimel and pay.  Gimel makes the sound g- and begins the word glidah which mean ice cream.  Pay makes the sound p- and begins the word parpar which means butterfly.  We took time today to illustrate our vocabulary words.  Student were able to review all of our letters and sounds and had an opportunity to play Around the World, racing against each other to identify the sounds that each of the letters makes.

This week we will celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut.  Students compared this celebration to July 4th and were surprised to hear that Israel is a very young country.  Some of our Gan Class students were very knowledgeable about how the United States came to be and were curious if Israel was formed the same way.  During our discussion, students gained an understanding that Israel is a very special place for a lot of different people and it wasn't until 1948 that it could be decided who should get to live there. Each student took home an Israeli flag today that they can use to celebrate Israel's birthday this week.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about the Gan Class.

See you next week!