Creating Torah Citizens

How Our School Develops a Community of Torah Readers

by Debi Rowe

In my synagogue’s Torah School, our students do not memorize their bar or bat mitzvah Torah portion from a recording. All of them know trop.

You might assume that this means our students must spend hours and hours of extra time preparing for the b’nai mitzvah ceremonies, or that we must dedicate a huge amount of curricular time and energy to training these students. But that’s not the case. Our students all know trop because our students all read Torah not just at their b’nai mitzvah services, but several times every year.

For the past five years, students in our midweek Hebrew classes have been reading Torah as part of our regular Thursday minhah or ma’ariv worship service.

Did God Create the Dinosaurs?

by Joel Lurie Grishaver
[cross-posted to the Gris Mill]

I was doing a workshop on “teaching God” to about sixty San Diego teachers. We get to the point in the conversation where I ask them to bring into our discussion questions about God that their students have asked them. And the winner was, a third grade teacher who had a student ask, “Did God Create the Dinosaurs?” Teachers frequently bring up this question when I do God workshops. They get asked it all the time (especially by precocious eight-year-olds), and they’re not sure that they know the right answer to give.

It is not as simple a question as it might seem. What it represents is a testing of two information sources. For an eight-year-old, dinosaurs are the heart of scientific reality. It is what they buy at science museums and read about in science books. Dinosaurs are a symbol of history that has been reconstructed from bones and fossils and clues. They are the end result of the scientific method, the C.S.I. of history. On the other hand, the Bible (Torah) is God’s truth. In the reality experienced by most eight-year-olds, the Torah is not yet a metaphor. It is literal. The distinction between it being a book of truth rather than a book of history (science) is not yet comprehensible.

Introducing a New Partnership and (drumroll, please…) jbop!

Looking for computer-based Jewish educational materials that actually… educate?

Are your students itching for educational software that’s not hokey and corney, but… cool and fun?

Does your school require technology that’s… easy to use?

Torah Aura Productions is teaming up with JeMM Productions, developers of fine technological Judaica, to bring you jbop 3.0, the next generation of computer-based curricular materials.

jbop is an innovative enrichment tool (“interactive activity center”) for use on computers in Jewish schools and homes. It’s a set of modules — each with six full interactive activity areas — on subjects from Pesah and Purim to Israel and Torah.

Best of all, jbop…

…represents the latest in technology-based education. It was developed by a team of top-notch Jewish educators in Israel and the United States, underwent research and development funded by the Covenant Foundation, and has already been successfully integrated into schools nationwide.

…is highly interactive, cool and fun. The jbop activity center features activities that let students animate their own Bible scenes, sing along with jewish music karaoke (and email sound clips to friends!), and play a variety of state-of-the-art games.

…is highly intuitive, simple to use, and easy to install. Using jbop doesn’t require you to distribute CDs or mess with the access settings of your personal firewall (you don’t even need to know what a personal firewall is!). No configuring. No technological gobbledygook. Just software that works. Just download, install, type in your access code, and you’re ready to rock-and-roll.

jbop 3.0 will be beta testing in May, and will be ready for full school and home deployment soon thereafter.

But you don’t have to wait. For a limited time, Torah Aura and JeMM are offering the jbop Yom Ha’Atzmaut Activity Pack free of charge. This special Israel@60 offer includes all of jbop‘s Israel lessons, and as an added bonus, you’ll also receive the Welcoming Shabbat Activity Pack.

To try out jbop today, get the free download at http://www.ejemm.com/jemm/israelat60.htm.

Questions about jbop? Check the TAPBB jbop FAQ.

Kids Don’t Benefit from “Dumbed-Down” Torah

We recently got this note from Rachel Margolis, a new educator at University Synagogue in Los Angeles. This year, she added Being Torah and I Have Some Questions About God to her curriculum. How’re things going? Read for yourself:

This past Friday our third and fourth grade students gave presentations to the synagogue at Shabbat services. The fourth graders also worked on a poster project that showed what “Torah stories” they have learned already this year. Students worked in groups of two to illustrate or explain the various chapters of Genesis they have studied.

Many congregants told me how impressed they were with the students’ work. I was proud to say that the kids aren’t simply learning Torah “stories” — it’s not like they’re studying from some dumbed-down version of the Torah. They are using a fantastic kid-friendly translation in Being Torah, which helps them to be “detectives” with the text and find patterns, repetition, and gaps in the story, which they then use to analyze the Torah.

Clearly they’re learning a lot — in many cases congregants were learning from the students’ work!

God as a Midrashic Dementor

In “Jewish Values From Alef to Tav,” the text in the lesson on the letter Nun has the line, “Midrash tells us that Moses died as a very old man when God kissed him.”

Josh was in Austin, Texas last weekend working with teachers at Congregation Agudas Achim and Temple Beth Shalom.

One of the teachers, Tammy S., mentioned that some of her students wanted to know more about this particular midrash. Josh gave her the short answer: “We got it from Rashi.” But he promised her more information. So here it is: