Aleph - First Grade

The Aleph class will struggle with the following questions as they explore and develop their own individual connection to the Jewish experience: What are things that Jews do that make us different from other peoples and religions? What are some of the things that Jews believe? How do Jews celebrate our holidays, rituals and traditions? ? What do all of these things mean to us? Young people in the Aleph class will continue to develop new skills, building on the experiences they encountered in Gan.

Aleph students will:

• Celebrate each holiday by focusing on the fulfillment of mitzvot connected to the holiday, from the hearing of the shofar on the High Holidays to the lighting of Chanukah candles. Aleph students will begin to study the meaning of each holiday in preparation for the celebration in the synagogue, learning the liturgy, symbols and characters of each holiday.
• Use music and artistic expression, games and experiential activities, interpretive dramatics and other creative learning experiences to discover the different dimensions of Judaism and explore Jewish living through all the senses.
• Explore the liturgy through song and movement, using siddurim (prayerbooks) created by the students and teachers and used in our Mini Minyan program on Shabbat mornings. Short prayers like Mah Tovu, Barechu and the Shema will be a part of a daily prayer service in which Aleph students will participate, enabling them to develop recognition for the building blocks of prayer and elements of Jewish liturgy.
• Develop a relationship with Hebrew as an integral part of prayer, a natural part of conversation in the classroom, and as the language of the Jewish people. Students will learn to call the people, places and things in our school by their Hebrew names and using their new language skills. Students will continue their learning of the aleph-bet, continuing to assign values, meanings and sounds to the letters, and beginning the decoding process as short words are presented.
• Acquire a language for talking about God, and discuss together what God means to each student. This conversation will be framed by Aleph students’ study of the siddur and narrative texts of the Torah.
• Form the foundation for a positive Jewish identity and strengthen their ability to express who they are as Jews.

Our goal in our Aleph class is to foster a sense of connectedness to the Jewish people, and to begin to understand our uniqueness as a people. Together we will begin the lifelong habit of asking questions and discovering the answers through an exploration of our holidays, celebrations and rituals.

Aenne Hahn Religious School
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