Beyond the Book

I have worked with the same kids for the past 3 years. I started with them when they were in third grade. Now they are in fifth grade. I have worked one-on-one with one of the students for the last two years teaching him Hebrew. The lessons are on Mondays and are online. Both of those are hard things to ask a little kid to do.

Because of my TAP lessons over the past year, to make it easier I have worked on building a good relationship with him. He is really interested in computers, as well as video games. I choose to use a portion of our lesson time to talk about his interests because that helps us build a personal relationship. At the start of a lesson he tells me about a project he is working on, which I am genuinely interested in. That means he is focused on telling me about something he likes instead of the idea that he doesn’t want to be in the lesson.

Our conversations in TAP also convinced me to use more multimedia elements in the lessons. I used to just teach from a book where the students would read words, circle letters, and write transliterations. After learning about how many kids struggle to look at a page for extended periods of time, I incorporated a whiteboard. This allows the kids to draw and play with colors as they work. I find that it allows them to be more engaged than they would be with a book.