Last week I raised different ideas to enrich your child's English by reading. This week I will discuss the talking: Dear Gaila, My oldest three children (out of five) just finished participating in the Readathon. It was really amazing, and I can tell already what a great boost it gave their reading and even to their English vocabulary. I myself am an English speaker, but my husband is a Hebrew speaker and we speak mainly Hebrew at home. I see now that my children really strug

Dear Gaila, My oldest three children (out of five) just finished participating in the Readathon. It was really amazing, and I can tell already what a great boost it gave their reading and even to their English vocabulary. I myself am an English speaker, but my husband is a Hebrew speaker and we speak mainly Hebrew at home. I see now that my children really struggle with their English and have even expressed disappointment that I haven't spoken to them only in English. It's to

Dear Gaila, I have a weekly remedial teaching session with a weak Hebrew speaker. I use Reading Rocks! (which is excellent, by the way). However, every time we come across the "is" word my student gets confused. How can I explain the concept of "is"? Thank you, Miriam Dear Miriam, There are two parts to my answer. First of all, you have to explain the concept to your student. This is hard because there is no direct translation for "is" in Hebrew. What I do is to use the past

Dear Gaila, How can I teach my students to spell "crazy English words"? Words that just don't make any sense because they don't follow the rules or just too hard for my 4th grade students? Hadas Dear Hadas, English is indeed a crazy language. Since so many words are borrowed from different languages, the spelling is often dependent on the source language rules. One trick I often like to use with my students (usually 3rd-5th graders, but also weak older students) is to create

178 participants, their friends and families were entertained by Ofer Goren, the renowned mime, won fabulous raffle prizes , bought tons of books and - of course - enjoyed the Awards Ceremony! Ofer Goren was fabulous! After the entertainment all Readathon participants got up on stage and got their Readathon prize packages they earned: The Book Sale was a great success as usual: Thank you to all our wonderful volunteers, including our Readathon website manager and mainten

Dear Gaila, My students have a rich enough vocabulary in English, yet with the English bagrut matriculations coming up I need to work with them on text comprehension. What tips can you give me? Dedicated Teacher Dear Dedicated Teacher, Working with your students (or your children!) on text comprehension is an important skill to develop early on - not only in high school! I'll share with you ideas that can be used in late elementary years all the way through high school. First