Menu of Workshops

The Beautiful Triangle

Let's help our students see math as something beautiful. Explore a unit that engages students in using their knowledge of angles and triangles to create geometric art. All math teachers will value model units that show how mathematics can be both a useful life skill and a way of expressing ideas and emotions.

Intended for Math teachers

Metaphor and God

Do you find it challenging to help your students express themselves? Is it while discussing Jewish texts or when writing in language arts class? Learn how literary concepts like metaphors and poetic structures can be integrated with Jewish concepts and texts to enhance understanding. Leave with lessons you can use to develop your students' self-expression.

Intended for Language Arts teachers for grades 4-8

Ancient History and Me

How does our past inform the present? Explore a unit of history that focuses on the interface between the rise of Ancient Greece and the Jewish encounter with Hellenism. Discover how to use primary sources to connect tensions of the past to conflicts in today's world. Investigate how to structure a culminating task that allows for students to express and consolidate their learning.

Intended for Language Arts and History teachers for grades 4-8

A Critical Thinking Approach to Numeracy

How do we make sure that students truly understand the math they are doing while they are doing it? What effective strategies build mastery? When should we teach them? How can we get students to reflect on the strategies they choose? Participants will answer these questions and take home strategies and games ready for classroom use.

Intended for Math teachers

Teaching Judaism through the Arts

Contemporary educational research strongly supports the efficacy of arts-based education.   This workshop reveals how arts-based teaching and learning enables students to form rich intellectual and emotional bonds with Judaism.   Through experiential learning activities, workshop participants will explore the effectiveness of song, drama, visualization, sculpture, and visual arts to deepen students’ appreciation of diverse topics including Tanakh, Chaggim, and Jewish history.   The workshop will provide frameworks and practical examples to empower teachers to enhance their own teaching practices through arts-based approaches.

The Five Senses and the Five Books of Moses

What are the ingredients for a creative unit that teaches a Torah narrative in Hebrew? Mix songs, scripts, games, art and puppets together and stir in an ethical theme. In this workshop, you will participate in model lessons to learn all the ingredients and tools needed to construct your own multi-sensory lessons for teaching the Five Books of Moses.
(Workshop is conducted in English; all texts are in Hebrew).

Intended for Elementary Judaics and Hebrew teachers

Democratic Citizenship from a Jewish Perspective

How can Jewish sources foster civic responsibility within our students? Speeches, letters, Talmudic text and other primary sources offer opportunities for discussions on democracy and human rights. Think Heal the World and help students become active, democratic decision-makers in their community.

Intended for Language Arts, Social Science, and Rabbinics teachers

From Slavery to Freedom:  Learning Black History and Passover through Literary and Visual Arts, Old and New

We advance our teaching of the value of freedom when students appreciate diverse experiences of the struggle for liberation.  This workshop integrates the study of slavery in North America with Passover and the Exodus from Egypt (sefer Shmot).  Each historical experience is studied for its own sake and then viewed in relation to one another for common themes.  In language arts students meet the flight to freedom in the novel "Underground to Canada."  History class grounds their study of black slavery and American Civil War.  Students study the Exodus story in Hebrew in Judaics class (Tanach), and learn the Haggadah in Hebrew language class.  Their sense of freedom and of ties that bind deepens through structured study of the art of macrame.

Intended for Second Language, History, Visual Arts, Dance, and Judaics teachers.