Alternative Jewish Education Pilot Program Planning

Ma'yan Tikvah is in the process of planning a pilot for an alternative Jewish education program for elementary school age children to start in February or March, 2018. As you can guess, we are planning to include a significant outdoor component, but also with other pieces that hopefully will make it possible for families to fit it into their busy schedules. We envision a program with some flexibility, depending on how deeply families want their child to learn, as well as a family component to include parents and siblings.

If you are interested in an alternative Jewish education experience, please contact Rabbi Katy at rabbi@mayantikvah.org. Here are the initial ideas, but this is subject to change with input from interested parents, so please let us know what your particular needs and desires are.

Initial Ideas for Alternative Jewish Education for Children

Pilot Program

The curriculum will focus on:

• Jewish values, such as caring for animals, honoring the elderly, caring for ourselves, our families, and our communities, caring for the Earth, and so on;

• Jewish values embedded in holidays;

• basic observance of holidays;

• some Hebrew, for reciting blessings for holidays and eating, and some key words;

• Bible stories that inform Jewish values;

• basic prayers for Shabbat; and

• individual-paced Hebrew decoding and understanding, using an online program.

   

Meeting times suggested:

• once a month on a Sunday morning at an outdoor location with the option for being indoors part of the time if the weather leads us in that direction; we currently envision that this will be three hours, from 10-1;

• one weekday afternoon class per month for 1½ hours, preferably in the home of one of the families;

• one or two online weekday classes per month, 1 hour long, using a video conferencing platform; and

• one family Shabbat program every 4-6 weeks, which could be 1) a Shabbat dinner hosted by one of the families, 2) coming to a morning outdoor service, 3) a Friday afternoon indoor or outdoor family Shabbat service, or 4) a Saturday afternoon/evening Havdalah program with an activity.

Materials will be provided for family or student activities that can be done at home between classes, including suggestions for discussions at the Shabbat dinner table and ideas for family field trips. The online Hebrew program will require regular work if a student wishes to progress and really learn to read. It will be an individual decision that each family makes for themselves as to how much they wish to invest in learning Hebrew. During group classes, students will learn to say Hebrew words, and there will be some review of letters and words written in Hebrew, but this will not be the focus.

In terms of deciding which Jewish values to focus on, the interests of the children in the group will be taken into consideration as much as possible.

We anticipate that the fee for this program as it is described above might be about $100/month/child, but this is not definite and depends in part on how many children register, how many online sessions per month, and the costs of curriculum and space rental. If you are interested but this doesn't work for you, please be in touch anyway.  Your ideas and input on all aspects of the program are important!

This is a very rough outline, but if there is enough interest, a pilot program will begin in February or March, 2018. In order to help us figure out the next step in the details, we would like your input from prospective families. If you are at all interested, it would be really helpful if you would fill out this brief online form. This is not a registration form, just a way for us to get an idea of the interest and to adapt the program based on input from families

Please feel free to be in touch with questions, thoughts, or ideas.

Rabbi Katy

rabbi@mayantikvah.org