Kaplan Family Learning Center
PLEASE NOTE AN IMPORTANT CHANGE IN OUR LEARNING CENTER CLASS SCHEDULE FOR THE COMING YEAR.
Planning a supplemental synagogue educational experience for children is challenging because we have so many important educational goals to accomplish in very limited time. We want to help our children to achieve competency in Hebrew and a broad knowledge of Jewish tradition, culture and values, and also to have a sense of excitement about their Jewish identity and a desire to nurture those connections into adulthood. And we face the additional challenge of accomplishing these goals during our children's very limited discretionary time in the afternoons.
We acknowledge the extraordinary dedication of our Learning Center students and families. We want to make sure that educational requirements remain realistic and that the design of our program maximizes our students' likelihood to succeed in achieving our goals.
We have, therefore, made the following changes for this year:
(a) On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Learning Center classes for all grades will conclude at 5:30pm instead of 6pm, for all grades. The time period between 5:30pm and 6pm will be used for additional tutoring. Teachers will call parents in advance to arrange for tutoring sessions during that half hour. If you feel your child needs tutoring please call your child's teacher. To maximize educational time during each Learning Center session, there will no longer be a snack break; students who wish to eat snacks will eat them before classes begin at 4pm or after they conclude at 5:30pm.
We are making this change in response to parents' and students' concerns about homework and study time, and we hope that families will be able to make good use of this additional half hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
(b) At the same time, we ask parents and students to take note of the breadth of the Learning Center experiences outside of the classroom, including trips to Jewish sites, home shabbat and holiday experiences, and tzedakah and tikkun olam (repairing the world) projects. These experiences are critical to our children's Jewish identity formation; they help our children to understand Judaism as something that is alive and vibrant, rather than something they only learn about in the classroom. In exchange for the reduction of Tuesday and Thursday classroom hours, we ask our families to affirm that these outside-the-classroom Learning Center experiences are part of our core educational program, rather than being extracurricular add-ons. Especially in light of the reduction in weekday hours, we ask you to attend these programs whenever possible and to treat them as you would treat the weekday sessions.
We hope these changes will result in more discretionary time and more one on one time with our teaching staff.