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You are here :		Jewish Zionist Education		Focus Areas		Early Childhood - Chalav Udvash		From our Teachers

During the school year of 2005 -2006, Chalav u'Dvash - Ivrit le Yaldey Ha Gan was piloted in 15 classrooms in Bergen County New Jersey as part of the "Hebrew in America" initiative www.jewishbergen.org/education/hebrewinamericacov.shtml
The program was also used at one site in Palo Alto, California. We are grateful to Dr. Wallace Green, director of Jewish Educational Services of the UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey and Ms. Shoshana Glazer, director of the Hebrew in America project and our pilot supervisor for their support and collaboration on the development of Chalav U Dvash.

The pilot year was an interesting experience for all of us. The participating teachers communicated with us regularly and their feedback and comments guided us in many of the revisions that were made to the original version of the program. An example of this is the way in which the Jewish festivals are integrated into the program. In the original version, we calculated how many lessons we thought teachers would have completed before they got to Rosh Hashanah. In the field, we realized what we should have known from the start -- that every group of children would advance at a different pace. That was when we decided to extract the festival vocabulary from a specific lesson at a specific time and create an additional guide which would enable teachers use festival vocabulary when a holiday comes around no matter where they are in the program. This felt much more organic to us and worked well in our pilot classes. Changes to the music, decisions about inclusion or exclusion of some of the materials in the final version as well as many new ideas for activities, which now feature in the teacher's guides, were all a product of our collaboration with our pilot teachers. Toda Raba to all of you!
We hope to have the same kind of relationship with all of our new Chalav u'Dvash teachers. We also have plans to include families in the program in an even more active manner in the coming school year.