Jane and Joel at NewCAJE
For those of you heading to NewCaje next week, please make sure to stop by the Torah Aura exhibit booth to chat with Jane Golub, or attend one of the sessions Joel Grishaver is offering this year.
We will have copies of new Torah Aura textbooks, including Parashah: Experiencing the Weekly Torah Portion, Experiencing Sacred Community, and the new BJL Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur Mahzor, and we will be previewing the new Hebrew Review App on iOS and Android.
This year Joel will teaching the following sessions: Teaching Torah for Meaning, Family Education, How to Turn Your Class into a Sacred Community and an Intensive session on Becoming an Excellent Hebrew/Prayer Session.
Joel’s sessions in detail
Joel has been creating tools for creatively teaching Torah for forty years. In this workshop he will share a number of his and other peoples’ innovations. We will look at Being Torah, Torah Toons, God-Talk, Storahtelling, Bibliodrama, The Internet, Project based learning and a lot of other ways of getting students to “make-meaning” out of a Biblical text.
This is a session on secrets to success in family education.. We will answer the following questions: How do you get parents to participate in Family education programming? How do you build good a strong relationships with families and establish good communication? What do you do that makes a family education event a good time/a valuable time for the adults as well as their children? What are new models for great family education programming that are outside of the normative ones like round-robin stations or Shabbat-in-a-Sack? What motivates families to come back for more? If your job includes planning family education, come learn techniques from one of the founders of the field.
Simple truth: Communities are built out of friendships. We build Jewish Community in our classrooms by building friendships among our students. We make it a sacred community by adding Jewish elements to the relationship. This workshop will be filled with process insights, techniques, activities and other programmatic factors that will help a teacher or a school to shape themselves into sacred communities.
Let’s assume that you’ve been teaching Hebrew school for years…Let’s assume that next year you are going to be teaching Hebrew for the first time. Either way—this intensive is for you. We are going to deal with every aspect of the role—and almost all of it will be based on research and best practices. We are going to talk about tips and strategies, tricks, techniques, and other ways to succeed. We will be high and lo-tech. We will be practical. Our curriculum will include:
- The strategy of welcoming
- Reading, Sounding, and Performing
- Creative Reading Drills
- The Importance of Structure
- Decoding Language (roots, prefix, suffixes)
- The Story behind each prayer
- Experiential Prayer
- Electronic Homework
- Classroom Management
- Engagement of Families
Consider this a Hebrew Teaching Boot Camp and a Hebrew Teaching Upgrade.