Overview

There has been a lot of work and discussion about the hows and whys of teaching Hebrew and תפילה. You can find a wealth of resources at: With All Our Hearts, and The Hebrew Project, Recently, the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland and Siegal College of Jewish Studies created a wiki called JECCHebrewPrayer-AvotImahot. In it they present a model for teaching prayer that was developed by educators in Cleveland. They devised an organizational chart meant to help us think about how we want to teach prayer. It's called the "Seven 'S' chart". You can read more about it at the above mentioned wiki or access a pdf version here.

The chart appears below. The yellow boxes relate to the general concept called כוונה //(Kavannah)// - the intention and meaning of the תפילה. The pink boxes relate to decoding and recitation. I suggest that as we think about what we want our students to get out of תפילה education, we use these contexts as a guide. (Thank you, JECC, Siegal College and the educators of Cleveland!)

What do we want our students to know? The list below is in no particular ranking order. Feel free to add your thoughts!
 * Decode with proficiency.
 * If reading means decoding + comprehension, then we need to admit that in our congregational schools we can't realistically teach them to read. We only have time to teach them basic letter/vowel recognition. In the best of worlds, we can get help them learn key תפילה words, which will help them understand the WHAT the prayer is all about. I would say that this is associated with the "Say" and "Sing" pink boxes above.
 * Be familiar with the כוונה of the prayers learned.
 * Associated with the 3 yellow boxes above as well as the green "Services" box.
 * Be familiar with the rubric of the worship service.
 * Green "Services"
 * Experience prayer
 * Green "Services" and yellow "Spiritual". DOING prayer directly leads to "getting" the כוונה of a particular תפילה as well as the whole service.

One more note: There are a lot of Hebrew/תפילה texts that have been published. Along with the above mentioned wikis, //Journeys Through the Siddur - Shabbat Morning // (Lane Yerkes & Christine Tripp; Torah Aura Productions, 2004) and הנני //- The New Hebrew Through Prayer volumes 1 & 2//, (Terry Kaye; Behrman House, Inc. 2002) are invaluable resources.

The next page focuses on what experiences we want to offer our students to enable them to achieve the goals listed above. Click here or on "How we get there".