Ulpan
Val found a company called Ulpan La’Inyan, which offers private lessons. The formal adult ulpan for Val and I doesn’t start until Sept 1. There is a summer session but its already halfway over. And there isn’t one specifically for the kids since they get it during school which also starts Sept 1. So as far as the public Ulpan (which in Ra’anana I’ve heard is very good), there’s nothing for now, until Sept.
So much for my plan to arrive here at the beginning of the summer so that the kids could do ulpan before starting school.
So that’s why we started looking into private ulpanim. This one was originally run through a South African community center in Tel Aviv I think, but caters now to all Anglos throughout the area. They have classes where you go to their centers, or they can send a teacher to you. So we scheduled a “trial lesson” at our apartment, with the intent of having one teacher come over and do a lesson for our entire family together. We are all at slightly different levels, but we thought it would make it more fun if we at least tried to do it together. We decided to tell them that we were at level 2, and we’d see how it goes. The first lesson was very nice, the kids even liked it and were volunteering to make more sentences with the new vocab words even after their “required” one per person was done. We all sat around the kitchen table, the teacher at the head of the table with her laptop, and we took turns reading and repeating after her, etc.
After the trial lesson we decided to pay for the whole 30 hour package (20 lessons, 1.5 hrs each, we’ll do it at night three times per week through the summer). We have the third lesson tonight, and our workbooks just arrived today! We have another meeting with the Misrad HaKlita (absorption ministry) coming up next week and we will ask if this is reimbursable, or if it would take the place of the formal public ulpan in Sept (i.e. might they pay for one or the other but not both). For now, we just paid for it ourselves.
