Counting the Omer: Finding the Balance

We were so excited to welcome back all of our friends after a long Pesach vacation.

This week we learned about the special days between Pesach and Shavuos. We count 49 days from the second day of Pesach until Shavuos. We are counting the days because we are so excited to receive the Torah and because we need to prepare ourselves.

Preparing our soul for receiving the Torah

Before Pesach we prepared our home to make sure it's clean from Chametz.
The Morah asked, "How can we clean our soul before Shavuos?"
"Is there a special scrub we can use for our soul?" No, its not a scrub...
Dovi said, "It's doing Mitzvos and connecting to Hashem that will make us closer to Hashem!" 

In order for our soul to be ready for receiving the Torah we need to take care of our inner behaviors. We need to make sure that we are behaving in the right way.
This week we spoke about Chesed and Gevura. Chesed is kindness/ love. Gevura is boundaries/fear.

We explored the idea in painting. For Chesed - kindness, we used soft blue. For Gevura - boundaries we used a strong red.

The Morah told us a story about two different personalities. Rabbi Yakov who had a Chesed personality and Shamei who had a Gevura personality. 

We played hide-and-seek in two different ways.
First we just used Chesed, we played with no rules everyone was allowed to do whatever they wanted. The game didn't last long.
Then we just used Gevura, we added a lot of rules.. Basically the children couldn't hide... It also didn't last long.

After discussing and exploring this idea we came to a conclusion that either too much Chesed or too much of Gevura isn't good.
So what is good?

Saige: "If we take a little bit of both it will be one better thing." Yes!

Hebrew reading program. 

This week we finished learning the last rules for reading in Hebrew. We are so excited that we finished the cap-it reading book.
One of the rules we learned this week is that in Hebrew we read from the top to the bottom but if the sound is Ch-Ah at the end of a word its read from the bottom to the top Ah-Ch!

We played a fun game to show the children how the rule works. The first two children were standing on the chairs and had to jump from the chair to the floor. The third child was starting on the floor and had to jump from the floor up on to the chair.

The rest of the children cheered on "top to bottom, top to bottom except for Ah- Ch at the end of a word".

Here we are playing a fun game where we matched the name that was written in English to the same name the was written in Hebrew.

Bingo game

We always have fun playing bingo. Practicing sounds and letter recognition.

Patterns

Our class had a lot of fun creating their own patterns!

Aleph Bais Adventures: Shin

Choosing a letter to make out of puzzle stix

Designing the letter shin with patterns and stickers

cutting silly putty strengthens our fine motor skills (and is fun )

Swat the letter, if you have a picture with that beginning sound!