I love to use both games and music when I teach children.

Games | Music

 


A big hit with several of my Hebrew and Chumash students is bingo!

I create new bingo boards for specific lessons to reinforce nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Some of them are below. Click on the thumbnails to see them in their full glory!

Below is an example of the kinds of Hebrew words that we practice using bingo. This is a sheet of “call cards” that are cut out and used to play the game. (At a later stage of play, I use a separate set of call cards that don’t have the Hebrew words on them, to practice recall.)

I have also used memory/matching games (purchased) and created a dominoes game to work on Hebrew letter recognition. One of the great things about creating my own games is that students love it when their name appears in the game. This is also a great way to get a pre-reading student to begin to recognize her or his own name in Hebrew.

Click on the image above to see a PDF of the dominoes set covering א through י.


I have one active, young, pre-reading Hebrew student who loves to sing and dance, and we sing and dance together–in Hebrew! We also laugh, and I am a firm believer that learning works better when it is fun. Even older, tween students (who might, on some days, consider themselves “too old” for such silliness) often find themselves drawn into it, despite themselves.

I create a PDF of all of the songs that I teach for two reasons:

  1. So that I know the correct words to sing.
  2. For students who are learning to read or who know how, we can use it to practice reading, as well as understanding.

 

In this case, I giving the PDF to parents after the lesson (at the student’s request, because she wanted to sing and dance more in my absence), so I included brief instructions about what to do during each line of the songs.

Click on the image below to see an example of a PDF that I prepared for use with one of my students.

Here are some of my favorite movement-based Hebrew songs for beginners: