by Ava Kate Arkader, Temple Beth Hillel Beth El
I have almost 30 kids in my second grade class, and one of the bigger activities that we do is Hebrew reading. I generally take a group of kids out into the hallway to read from the books, and surprisingly, it’s a much simpler task than one would think. Although it is not difficult for me, it definitely is for some kids, and here is an example of one of those situations and how it was handled.
My class is split in half between two teachers, but when we go into Hebrew reading, it gets split up in fourths between me, the teachers, and other madrichim. A few weeks ago, we were splitting up into Hebrew groups, and one kid, who had not been in my group before, got added to my group of the more advanced readers. I could see that he felt very pressured and was struggling to keep up with the other readers, so I offered to pull him aside so we could go over his areas of confusion to make him feel less pressured around his friends. This helped him out very much because he could genuinely learn with me targeting the things he was struggling with to go back over. The end results were very effective for his learning and everyone turned out to be on the same page in the end.