Lehavin U’lehaskil: A Curriculum That Trains our Students to Become Independent Readers of Tanach
Source: Jeducation World
A comprehensive program called Lehavin U’Lehaskil (To Understand and Discern) has been developed to help students gain a mastery of the Hebrew Tanach text. It focuses on providing teachers a systematic approach to teach our students how to learn Tanach independently in the original Hebrew text. It empowers children by teaching them the skills needed to become confident, independent learners of Tanach, through decoding and translating words, phrases and verses from the Biblical text. This curriculum provides standards and assessments, and a clear, organized, systematic approach to teach the children skills, high frequency words and sharashim (verb roots). Workbooks, Teacher Editions, digital versions, and various manipulatives are used to slowly teach – step by step – all the skills needed so that all children – on any level – can achieve mastery of the language of Tanach. Incorporated into the relevant and timely lessons in the LehavinU’Lehaskil program are exercises which focus on new skills, reinforcement of old skills, daily routine, sharashim practice, and the “breaking down” of pesukim (verses) into its grammatical parts. This program is comprehensive, and addresses children of all backgrounds, who have different levels of knowledge.
The program is built on three main principals: Teach, Review, and Build.
Teaching children from the original Biblical text is a key component toward enabling our students to become independent learners of Tanach. In theory, it might seem like a daunting task to teach fluency in Biblical Hebrew. However, when the skills are broken down clearly, and word/sharashim lists and exercises are available with a Teacher Edition that follows through on that specific methodology, the task at hand is approachable and doable. When the children learn skills from Biblical Hebrew, their ability to understand and retain their skill knowledge will increase greatly.
Over the course of the past few years the Lehavin U’Lehaskil curriculum has made inroads in over 150 Day Schools across America. The program is presently being implemented in Australia, London and Panama City. It is a young program that has grown at a rate faster than imagined (which confirms the need for such a program). Requests have been coming in for the program to be translated into many foreign languages. Lehavin U’Lehaskil is sponsored by the Consortium of Jewish Day Schools, a non-profit organization, which is dedicated to the empowerment, development, and improvement of Jewish day schools. The curriculum is available to all Jewish Day Schools, its teachers and its students.
Read the entire article at Jeducation World.