Monsey, NY – Combining his expertise with children at risk with his skills as an educator, Rabbi Yaakov Horowitz, founder and director of Project YES and founder and dean of a Monsey yeshiva, hopes to prevent the problem of at risk teens with a newly created Chumash curriculum that will provide children with the tools they need for academic success.
Working on the theory that many at risk children began their backwards slide at the early elementary school level when they fail to acquire the basic skills needed to succeed in school, Rabbi Horowitz developed a skills-based Chumash curriculum that would provide students with the ability to acquire basic vocabulary and grammar skills, instead of only learning by rote.
The Bright Beginnings workbook, which is being distributed by Torah Umesorah, contains appealing graphics with different colors and shapes denoting nouns and verbs which guide children into breaking down complex words in Chumash into root words, suffixes and prefixes. This allows the student to master the language of the Chumash instead of just memorizing endless words, an approach that does not work for many children.
Rabbi Horowitz has long championed the critical need to teach children HOW to learn and politely but firmly states his belief that children who don’t master Lashon Hakodesh are at far greater risk of dropping out of school — as he points out in his classic 2007 Mishpacha essays, aptly titled “It Doesn’t Start in Tenth Grade” and “Training Wheels.”
Below are excerpts from his columns:
Training Wheels
“If one takes a few steps back and surveys the overall landscape of how we impart Torah teaching to children and adults, one might be struck by a puzzling dichotomy. We seem to be offering our children a significant array of learning assistance and support after some form of educational failure has occurred. However, very few of these tools are offered to children who are in the critical ‘training-wheels’ phase of their learning experience. Going back to the bicycle analogy; that would seem to be like having our children start riding their bicycles without the benefit of training wheels, and only providing them to those who severely injure themselves by falling off their bicycles repeatedly.”
“Take the limud of chumash, for example. More than ninety percent of all words that appear in chumash are variations of only 270 root words! There are 26 verbs (ex. yatza, holach) and 38 nouns (ex. lechem, makom) that appear in chumash more than 500 times each**! If we were to give children a rudimentary understanding of lashon hakodesh — teach them the shoroshim and shimushim (‘root words’, prefix, suffix, etc.) — before or as soon as they start learning chumash, we would be providing them with the chinuch ‘training wheels’ they need to succeed.”
It Doesn’t Start in Tenth Grade
“While much attention is focused on the teen years, when many at-risk children begin exhibiting symptoms of distress, I strongly feel that in many instances the slide began far earlier, when children failed to acquire the basic skills they desperately need to achieve success.
“In these challenging times, when not “making it” in Yeshiva translates into squandered childhoods, unrealized potential, and often a complete abandonment of Yiddishkeit, we would do well to make a serious communal cheshbon hanefesh and decide if the hora’as sha’a (extenuating circumstances) of the climate nowadays mandates that we slow down the pace a bit and properly prepare our children with the skills they will need to succeed.”
Currently only volume one, which covers the beginning of Parshas Lech Lecha is available, with volume two already underway and more volumes in the planning stages.
