Posted on October 16, 2017
Hello Gan Class Families!
It was so wonderful to see everyone today for the first of many classes in a row this fall! We had an amazing day.
We began our morning with Tefillah in the Sanctuary. For the first time, we used the siddurim. Cantor Ken showed us that the Siddur opens from the opposite side as a regular book. We did an amazing job following along with the pages and we are looking forward to learning many the prayers this year.
Our new letters this week were tav and dalet. Tav makes the sounds t- and begins the word torah. Dalet makes the sound d- and begins the word degel which means flag.
Bar taught us lots of new Hebrew words! We played two new games which required us to learn the Hebrew words for many of our body parts. We already knew some of the words but were excited to learn new ones like the word for ear, ozen. In our silly game, partners had to touch hands to knees and elbows to toes by following the Hebrew commands.
Today we enjoyed our very first Torah Story. We read the story of Creation and learned about all the things G-d made when creating the world. It took six days of work to create the world and on the 7th day, G-d rested.
Today we studied things that are special about the Torah. Our lesson had us travel to the Chapel where we were able to look inside one of the Torahs! We practiced standing while the ark is opened and saw how the Torah is dressed. Each student held the yad and used it to point at the letters inside the Torah as we learned that the oil on our fingers can hurt the special paper of the Torah. It was super lucky that as we were asking questions about how the Torah was made, Rabbi Liben walked by on the way to his office. He was thrilled to join us and share his answers to some very insightful questions. Something that was very interesting to the Gan Class students was that every Torah, everywhere in the world has all of the same stories!
I look forward to seeing you all next week for Aleph Bet Centers, an opportunity to study the letters we have already learned through games and activities.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about the Gan Class.
Michelle