Letter of the Day

We have been working on reviewing the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets to get ready for our next trip to Jerusalem in ...gulp... one month from today! (this was written a while before I posted it - now there are 2 weeks left!)

If you ever wanted to learn a little bit about Hebrew or Arabic, check out my  Letter of the Day pdf file.  I put this together to help me refresh what I used to know about Hebrew and Arabic.  Each day introduces a new letter and shows how to use it in a few relevant words.

To learn with this file, print out one page and explore it as a family in a casual setting, like over lunch.  You can practice writing the letters with your pretzel sticks or spaghetti noodles, and make it fun.  After looking at it together, maybe tape the pages to a wall so your kids can review when they are curious again.

Hebrew has only 22 letters!  Okay, it's actually 26 if you count letters that make a different sound when you put a dot inside. And some letters have a different final form, so that's technically 31 letter forms to learn, plus there are about 9 vowel-related markings... but nothing to be scared about!  Where there's a will, there's a way!

Here's a catchy song to help you with the Hebrew Alphabet!

Arabic is now on Duolingo! Arabic has 28 letters and a half-dozen vowel-related markings.   Here's an Arabic Alphabet song with a nice tune, and here is another alphabet song that uses the alphabet tune you're used to.  Here is a video that shows how the Arabic letters look and sound at the beginning of common words.  One thing that worries people about Arabic is that the letters connect like cursive, so many letters look different when they are in the middle or end of a word.

Here's that pdf Letter of the Day file again:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EKGbQSJ2i2f6qTHiKzDrmNgKtT6oZd9Z/view?usp=sharing

Good luck, and even if you start and don't get all the way through the end, at least you'll be forming a few new dendrites for your troubles!