Teaching Tip: By Mushkie Lipsker @evergrowingeducator
Making texts feel more meaningful and engaging in honor of Hei Teves:
This month, we celebrate the return of the seforim, and we celebrate learning. Learning from the original texts is so important, yet children can be afraid of text-based learning for various reasons. Perhaps the text can be overwhelming for them to read or translate, especially if it’s not in their first language. Children might feel like the text isn’t meaningful to them and tune out when reading.
Bringing in “text connections” is a great way to help learning feel more meaningful and engaging to the students. Let’s take the text of Ve’al Hanisim of Chanukah, for example, and see how it can connect to 1) another text, 2) the world, and 3) themselves.
For younger students, ask guided questions that lead to specific connections, such as:
Text to Text: “What other text do we sing (each month on Rosh Chodesh) that are also singing praises to Hashem? You can even find the Shoresh at the end of this Tefillah” (Hallel)
Text to World: “What miracles did we recently have in Eretz Yisroel?” (when Iran…??)
Text to Self: “What special thing happened recently to you or your family member?”
For older students, you can ask them more broadly:
Text to Text: How does this text connect to any other text that you know of?
Text to World: How does this text connect to current events, news, or something else in the world?
Text to Self: How does this text connect to YOU?
When we encourage students to come up with these text connections, we aren’t just helping them feel more connected to the text that day. We are also helping them train themselves to look for these connections and find meaning as they learn other texts throughout their lives.
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