School Structure

Our school’s mission manifests in our curriculum in 3 discrete sections of our morning, each focusing on different learning experiences: Family Minyan, Hebrew, and Judaics.

Family Minyan is a gathering of our students and their families from 9:30-10:00 each Sunday. During this time, we learn, recite, and think about morning prayers. In addition to being important community time, the educational goals of minyan are to familiarize students with the morning prayers so that they will feel at home in the synagogue, and to help to make prayer a meaningful experience for each person in our community by talking about issues of meaning and spiritual connection as they come up in traditional prayers. To that end, minyan incorporates stories and teachings to help each person find new ways of understanding and connecting to Jewish liturgy.

Our classroom curriculum is divided between siddur Hebrew and Judaics. The primary goal of our Hebrew program is to prepare students to read fluently from the siddur and the Torah. Coupled with a vocabulary of the 200 words that appear most frequently in the siddur, this skill will allow our children to participate in the life of the synagogue and lay the groundwork for further Hebrew study, whether ancient or modern. Our Hebrew classes are divided by skill level, rather than by age, in order to best meet the needs of our students. For students who can read comfortably from the siddur, we offer an enrichment class that, on alternate years, focuses on either trope or Modern Hebrew.

The pillars of our Judaics curriculum are Torah, Worship (in terms of spirituality and in terms of developing comfort with Jewish liturgy, and including holiday and lifecycle rituals), and Social Values. Within each of these areas, teachers seek to incorporate a range of Jewish values and modes of expression, imparting to students the Reconstructionist belief that Judaism is an evolving civilization and celebrating its language, art, and history alongside its religion. Attention to diverse Jewish perspectives and experiences is woven into each class session.