Can we talk Judaics? Plese help!

[Ester Maria]

I'm interested very much in hearing what are Jewish homeschoolers on these boards doing for Judaics. I'd also prefer this discussion to focus on the level of content more than on the level of discussion specific programs and materials to teach that content - so this is not a "what are you using?" thread as much as a "what are you studying?" one. :)

 

Other than the linguistic part - I would suppose that most of you do ivrit, or lashon kodesh, or both - what exactly are you studying for Judaics on this stage of your education, what's your general plan and what are you planning to cover? I'm talking about all levels, I put this in K-8 section as my kids are currently in that age range (I have girls, 12 and 13 y.o., and I'm somewhat lost too regarding how to plan Judaics), but really, I'm asking about all age ranges.

 

Do you simply "squeeze in" Hebrew study some texts on Jewish history, culture and holidays, add in some Chumash readings and maybe a bit of Rashi and call it Judaics?

Do you do your Judaics by studying parashot and circumstancially deal with the Jewish year cycle?

Do you focus on Chumash, or study Nach as well?

If you have girls, do you include any level of Talmud study? Rambam?

Do you study Jewish philosophy, if so, what?

Do you do "unit-study"-like studies of halachot related to specific topics (shabat, kashrut, tzniyut, etc.)?

Do you study Jewish history as part of Judaics, or you just add it to regular Hisory?

What about ethical issues from Jewish point of view, how we relate to other people and religions, etc?

Subdivisions within Jewish society, anyone studying that? Explaining to kids which movements and streams of thought exist and how they came to be?

Anything else you can think of?

 

Please help, I'm really interested in seeing how are people approaching it - from all "levels" of observance as well as secular/cultural.

Thank you in advance.

 

ETA: "plese" in the title should, of course, be "please", it's a typo. Sorry.

Edited April 18, 2010 by Ester Maria

[Smithie]

My kids are young yet, and go to Religious School at our temple, so I am not overly fussed about including Judaics except the make the Jewish choice whenever the Jewish choice presents itself at a point in history/point in the year. So, Jewish fairy tales, Jewish language arts projects such as writing and illustrating a haggadah, etc. They are using the Chai curriculum at school. I imagine we'll start Hebrew as a formal homeschool subject in 3rd grade or so.

 

I think Jewish children of both sexes are entitled to a basic level of Talmudic literacy, but I don't intend to privilege that over the IMO equally important philosophical and historical readings. You can never cover it all, that's the work of many lifetimes, so I think I'll try to let the kids pick their direction. Flavius Josephus? Go for it, my little historian! Spinoza? Feel the angst! ;)

[alpidarkomama]

Our schedule is pretty much 50% secular studies, 50% kodesh studies (about 90-120 minutes each per day on a 45ish weeks per year schedule). It might seem like 90-120 minutes for secular studies would be a paltry amount, but we accomplish just about everything outlined in the WTM book. The only adjustments I made is that we rarely do history projects (just the readloud book + narration + map work) and we use Apologia Zoology for our science text, and we do about every other experiment. I don't bother with narration on that since DD6 is a science powerhouse and I already know she can tell me volumes about the things we are studying (thank you, David Attenborough!!!!!). I do laugh about the "spend 15 minutes discussing your family's religion"!!!!! Definitely not studying Judaism. :) :) :)

 

I have four kids, ages 6 (finishing 1st grade), 4, 3, and 2. Our normal routine for kodesh studies is....

 

1) davening w/all of us together (daily)

2) parsha study 3x/wk

3) other special studies 3x/wk (right now it's Pirkei Avos; at other times it is the upcoming holiday)

3) Hebrew songs, old ones and at least one new one per week (daily)

4) special unit, i.e. on melachos or food berachos (2x/week)

5) then DD6 by herself has biblical Hebrew (using Migdalor, Yesodos Halashon, and Lashon Hatorah) (daily) (as soon as we finish Book 3 of Migdalor, in a few weeks, we'll start reading chumash)

6) DS4 is doing beginning kriyah and DD3 is learning the alef bet by osmosis :) (nearly daily; it's not mandatory, but he rarely chooses to skip it.)

 

A lot of topics, like tznius, ethical issues, and good middos, come up in our daily lives rather than being an actual subject of study. I do think about what concepts I want to teach during the year, but it's all just through ordinary conversation. I've done a little compare/contrast with other religions as they come up in our ancient history lessons. We read several sources for Jewish history alongside Story of the World as relevant topics came up. We've finished ancient history, and still have three months left in our learning calendar, so next I'm going to do a readaloud of Jewish history just to make sure I cover the basics for that period.

 

The Jewish subdivisions you mentioned would just be part of our history lessons as it comes up.

 

As a guideline, I use a curriculum outline published by the Mizrachi school in Cleveland. It's quite thorough. It's no longer available on their website, but it was publicly available at no charge, so I'd be happy to pass it along to anyone who is interested. I think of it in terms of providing a structure of what comes next. But Jewish education is also meant to be "al pi darko"("according to their way"), so I don't use it as in First Grade = you must cover these subjects.

 

What an absolute pleasure to be our children's kodesh teacher. Yum, yum, yum! :)

 

-Kerith in Savannah, GA

[Ester Maria]

I think Jewish children of both sexes are entitled to a basic level of Talmudic literacy, but I don't intend to privilege that over the IMO equally important philosophical and historical readings. You can never cover it all, that's the work of many lifetimes, so I think I'll try to let the kids pick their direction. Flavius Josephus? Go for it, my little historian! Spinoza? Feel the angst! ;)

I agree - that's partially why I'm so overwhelmed, so many things out there to study, so little time!

 

I've basically focused on lashon until now (mainly ivrit, though, since we have family in Israel and we go there a lot so our "Hebrew studies" were mostly organized around the spoken, modern component of the language). We read Chumash, learned tefillot; when they were younger we also did some "unit studies" on chagim, yom tovim, tkasim (usually circumstantially), and included some notions on Jewish history in our History studies, but that's pretty much about it. I feel like we lack structure in Judaics.

 

My older one seems to be philosophically inclined, though. I got her started on Philo of Alexandria, and after this "spring break" I intend to do Kuzari with her (and probably with the sister too), and I told her that if she wants to do some serious Rambam or Talmud study, she'll have to do it with dad (who is not all that thrilled about the idea :().

Our schedule is pretty much 50% secular studies, 50% kodesh studies [...]

Our normal routine for kodesh studies is....

May I say, I'm impressed! You seem to be doing it really thoroughly with the littles. :)

 

Do you intend to keep the 1:1 kodesh/chol ratio in the upper years as well?

As a guideline, I use a curriculum outline published by the Mizrachi school in Cleveland. It's quite thorough. It's no longer available on their website, but it was publicly available at no charge, so I'd be happy to pass it along to anyone who is interested.

I'd be interested in it, if you're willing to share. :) PM?

 

We're actually secular (okay, a bit traditional with regards to certain things, it's not that we're completely disconnected from our heritage and treasure it only "intellectually", but we're not frum, though we have frum family members too), but big believers in Jewish education for Jewish children, in sense that, while we believe that religiosity or atheism is a matter of choice - and while we've made our choice, we are going to allow our children to make their choice too - we also believe that we should know our cultural identity.

 

But I'm just lost regarding the general structure - which then I could tailor to each kid individually - I try to be generally aware of what kids study in day schools (plus the kids tell me themselves each time they come back from various family visits where they often "touristically" attend a day school for few days while there :)), I talk to people whose kids attend day schools, but I could really use some advice on the structure. I guess the main problem is that I don't know where exactly we're going at all, so any time my kids bring me articles from chabad.com, or something like that, and start asking questions, I realize how much they don't know, and I'm clueless as to where to start. That's why I asked all the questions about how to teach "social scene", differences within the Jewish world, and of course what about the primary texts. Anyway, thinking out loud now. :D

 

Thank you both for your responses, I really appreciate them, feel free to add more anything you can think of, or to talk about what you personally plan on doing or would like to accomplish, I'm interested in any kind of exchange of opinions on kodesh studies. :)

[Ester Maria]

Bump.

[Shifra]

Ester Maria--

 

When I was in sixth grade (about the ages of your girls) we were learning Sefer Yayira for Chumash (and yes, we started at the beginning and finished the whole book by the end of the year; however, we did skip some of the more detailed descriptions of the mishcan in Chumash), Sefer Shoftim (which we completed) for Navi.

 

Halacha we did using the teacher's sheets (and I think that she got most of her information for the laws of the holidays from Sefer Hatoda'ah--published in English as Book of Our Heritage, but originally meant as a textbook for Israeli public schools); however, we did start Kitzur Shulchan Orech for Halacha in seventh grade, so your girls may be able to handle it now. Our teacher also taught us halacha based on what we were learning in Chumash--the laws of honoring your parents when we got up to that (there's a book called Respectfully: Honoring Your Parents by Ze'ev Greenwald), the laws of Shabbat when we got to that inside the Chumash too. For the laws of Shabbat, the book The 39 Avoth Melacha of Shabbath by Rabbi Baruch Chait is pretty much what we learned.

 

Jewish history we started in seventh grade also, using Our People: History of the Jews by Jacob Isaacs, which is not great but was all that was published under Orthodox auspecies at the time (and I went to an ultra-Orthodox school). Artscroll now has Sand and Stars, which is probably a better option for discussing Jewish history since the destruction of the Second Temple. Yesterday, Today and Forever is a good history book for the Biblical period. We did not study either mishnah (except for Perkai Avot--The Ethics of our Fathers, which mind you if you want to teach your girls mishnah is a good place to start) or Talmud, because as I said, I went to an ultra-Orthodox school. So I can't help you there.

 

We also learned Biur Tefillah; mostly what the prayers meant. I know that most teachers used the commentary from the Hirsch siddur to explain things.

 

Jewish philosophy was not really taught as a separate subject in school, but the best book in English for teenagers on the subject is L'Hovin Ul'haskil: A Guide to Torah Haskofoh by Eliezer Gervirtz (it's out of print, by occasionally amazon.com has a copy). Other books in that series include Lishmor V'Laasos: A Guide to Basic Principles of Jewish Law and Menucha V'Simcha: A Guide to Basic Laws of Shabbos and Yom Tov.

 

We did Hebrew language too, but I am pretty sure that you have that covered.

 

Now I know that you did not want any "I use this curriculum", but www.shypub.com has great workbooks for all the Day School subjects. Many day schools use them, and they are highly rated, if expensive. Since your are using Tal Am, you would not want them for Hebrew language, but for all other subjects they are the best thing out there as far as workbooks for non-Israelis are concerned. Why don't you check out their guides and buy them for the grades your daughter are in? They also have workbooks for mishnah (traditionally started in fourth or fifth grades) and gemara (traditionally started in sixth or seventh grades).

 

If you want Israeli textbooks, I have bought textbooks from www.books4u.co.il, but you would need to know what you are looking for (I don't think they have sample pages on the web). An American source of Israeli textbooks is www.israelbookshop.com and click on their Brookline, MA site. They do have sample pages for most of the books that they carry.