Our Hebrew program at Temple Emanuel, Kensington, MD, was at a crossroads: for years our goals were to teach decoding and then focus on key prayer words and phrases. And we were accomplishing those goals. Most children were ready for their b’nai mitzvah ceremonies; they could sound the words, had an understanding of the prayer service, and were ready to read Torah and Haftarah.

But...

My Hebrew teachers and I wanted to invigorate our program and make it more current and enticing. We wanted to maximize learning time, to extend it beyond the four classroom hours per week we had available, and to revamp our homework practices.

After numerous faculty meetings, we concluded that we needed to change our curricular materials. We wanted to improve learning outcomes, to engage the students in a personal way, and to create a program that would encourage our students to carry Hebrew into their homes, and more precisely, to their personal computers!

After examining a variety of materials, and by unanimous request from the faculty, we adopted both the Hineni and Shalom Ivrit series. We plan to emphasize modern Hebrew with Shalom Ivrit and tefillah with Hineni.

We'll send home the interactive CDs for prayer study at home; this will extend instructional time, since the children are quite willing to do Hebrew exercises on the computer and play online games which reinforce their Hebrew. The knowledge that students love to play video games - and also rely heavily on their computers - spurred us to adopt the CDs.

I am proud of the inclusive way we made the changes here, at Temple Emanuel in Kensington, and I look forward to seeing the results!

(Editor’s note: Look for Itzik’s name on the editorial committee for Welcome to Israel, the Jewish History Observer, and History of the Jewish People.)

Dr. Itzik Eshel is Educator at Temple Emanuel, Kensington, MD. He can be reached at itzik.eshel@templeemanuelmd.org