I admit that I spend much too much time sitting in front of a computer, ostensibly investigating how people can use computers educationally instead of just to have fun with them (which isn't the sort of thing that gets taught at universities ... yet).
But I'm not there every day. I even have a bit of a private life, as you, kind reader, may have discovered if you've taken the leap to my other pages.
But even without prying into my private life, there are things that I'm involved with that perhaps deserve mention.
For instance, two days a week I work in one of the two nurseries/kindergartens of my kibbutz: Gan Ofarim. So perhaps this is as good a place as any to review a bit about what education is like in a kibbutz nursery -- today.
In our gan we have 25 children. Half of them are kibbutz children while the other half come from neighboring communities. The parents of these children have chosen to bring their children each morning to the kibbutz for various reasons, but on the whole they're convinced that kibbutz education, at this age at least, is preferable for their children. Since paying to have a child in one of our children's houses isn't cheap, they must think that they're getting their money's worth.
Our gan is open from 7:00 until 16:00. The children eat both breakfast and lunch in the gan and have a nap from around 13:30 to 15:00. Three adults work with the children during the day -- the ganenet and two helpers. These helpers (m'taplot, of which I'm one) have the responsibilities for keeping the gan clean and taking care of the meals, but we also have a good deal of contact with the children, and when the ganenet isn't around I get the privilege of reading the children a story, working with them in their playground and other "educational" activities.
Much of the "educational" emphasis is on nature and the seasons, and on the holidays. Almost daily we're outside getting to know the flora and perhaps the fauna of the area, and the daily "circles" in which the ganenet sits and talks with the children for perhaps half an hour are often devoted to the upcoming holidays. We of course also have blocks and costumes and playthings of many types, and each day a couple of hours are devoted to this sort of unstructured play as well.
That's a picture of our Rosh HaShannah celebration this past year at the gan. On the table you can see honey cookies which the kids made, along with grape wine which they prepared as well. There are also pomegranate seeds on the table. What the kids didn't finish eating at this celebration went into a jug that sat quietly in a closet, fermenting slowing into a tasty wine which we drank at our Pesach celebration.
Speaking about Pesach, each year, a bit before the Seder, we venture outside for a day of "wandering", a way of identifying with B'nei Yisrael who wandered in the desert for forty years (that's last year's gan in the photograph, just before we started our trek):
This is one of the ways that we have of establishing an emotional attachment in the children toward the holidays and life-cycle events that are a central part of our lives. Hopefully we're building the foundation on which healthy children an flourish.
If any of this is of particular interest to anyone, I'm trying to concentrate information on kibbutz that's available on the internet on another page of mine. You might try visiting it.
And if you have a particular question about kibbutz education which you think should be expanded on in these pages, let me know and I'll consider expanding what's been presented here:
please tell me more about .......
back to a persona or two
[about this page]