“When you have their attention and teach in a way that makes you, the rebbi, happy, it’s contagious, and you can connect with any student.”
Ever since some long-ago math instructor put two stones together to teach addition, teachers have been using props and tools to help their students learn. Even today, in our age of digital communication and distance learning, any parent observing a child in a toy store knows that kids learn best by tactile interaction.
From a menahel in Far Rockaway who uses animal feet to teach kashrus, to a rebbi in Florida who shows his students how to separate the wheat from the chaff, meet chinuch innovators whose innovative approaches are making learning come alive.
Rabbi Yosef Cohen
Arie Crown Hebrew Day School
Skokie, Illinois
20 years in chinuch
Ten years ago, when a friend at shul struggled to understand a gemara sugya on money, he jokingly asked Rabbi Yosef Cohen to come up with a system to teach the differences between a pruta and a sela. “He asked me, ‘What would be if we minted thousands of coins and everything was bought and sold this way? Instead of selling a can of Coke for a dollar, what if we sold them for prutas?’ ”
“To be sure, the biggest talmidei chachamim have a hard time with these masechtas, because practically, we don’t use that monetary system,” Rabbi Cohen explains. “But I didn’t realize how a small comment would revolutionize a city’s curriculum.”
He hit the ground running, asking a wooden nickel promotional company to mint six different colored coins.
So began the Pruta System Program, originally marketed to the students as an incentive program. Rabbi Cohen, who currently teaches the eighth grade, began distributing prutas to the middle school students. “You asked a great sh’eilah on the Gemara? Here’s a pruta. Put all the seforim back in the beis medrash? Have a pruta. You were kind to a classmate? There ya go, have a pruta.”
The idea picked up speed when students realized that they could trade up their prutas to eventually buy selas. Soon enough kids could list the exchanges in their sleep: eight prutas in an issur, two issurs to a punyon, two punyon to a maw, six maw to a dinar, four dinar to a sela. And the need for coins grew.
“Kids would have cleaned the cafeteria floors after lunch in school to get a coin,” quips Rabbi Cohen. “They each wanted to acquire the next coin to eventually trade up to the coveted sela.” (You’d need 768 prutas for a sela, in case you were wondering.)
As it became clear that the program was gaining momentum, more touches of authenticity were added.
“In the Gemara, it talks about an arnak, a money pouch, so we had these blue velvet sacks created and handed them out to the boys to hold their coins.” In addition, bookmarks with the exchange rates were handed out as a cheat sheet, until the boys could calculate the figures on their own.
The entire middle school division participated in the program, which ran for eight weeks and culminated in a Yom Hashuk, a marketplace replete with a “money changer,” where the boys could buy anything from seforim to tchotchkes.
“If we built our homes using measurements of amah, or kept track of our bowling scores using gematrias instead of numbers, think of how much information and basic mathematical skills the kids could learn every day,” Rabbi Cohen says.
The program was so successful that every school in Chicago — from the Modern Orthodox day school to the chassidish cheder — has adopted it. Its popularity has spread across the country as schools in New York, Baltimore, Cincinnati, South Bend, and Florida have implemented it as well.
Now doesn’t the metric system seem less daunting to learn?
Rabbi Yeshua Weinstock
Yeshiva Ohr Yehuda
Lakewood, New Jersey
23 years in chinuch
It’s a bird, it’s a plane… no wait, it’s still a bird! Truth be told, it’s more like a mini-aviary that you encounter walking into Rabbi Yeshua Weinstock’s pre-1A classroom, where he cultivates a love of learning through nurturing the love of Hashem’s airborne creatures.
Several years ago, Rabbi Weinstock, then a primary-grade rebbi, looked for ways to make the classroom exciting. Joining forces with a fourth-grade rebbi, they procured a nest of parakeets. He then bought a cockatiel, picked up a macaw that someone was giving away, and asked pet stores if they had birds they needed to vacate.
“For every bird I bought, I bought a book,” he says. “No bird was too big of a challenge.”
Five years ago, Rabbi Weinstock started commuting daily from Williamsburg to New Jersey to launch the first class Pre-1A class of Yeshiva Ohr Yehuda in Lakewood. The birds, of course, came along.
If you walk into Rabbi Weinstock’s class now, you’ll meet an African gray parrot, an eclectus parrot, sun connors, a quaker parrot, and parakeets, along with a nest of eggs the latter just laid. There’s also a litter of bunnies. (“The babies are adorable, but the second they get too big, we bring them upstate and give them away.”)
Each September, the new class is divided into those who want to jump right in and get to know the birds, those who watch from the sidelines, and those who are petrified (thankfully, they’re in the minority). While class is in session, the birds roam freely, often landing on the students’ shoulders or their heads. Far from a distraction, the birds are like members of the class — and they actually add a calming effect. In fact, the free-roaming birds encourage the children to learn. The kids’ curiosity is constantly piqued because there is much to ask about their winged friends.
“Kids react based on how they see the adults react,” Rabbi Weinstock says. “I teach the boys about tzaar baalei chaim. I tell them it’s normal to be scared, but to screech and carry on will be detrimental to the bird — the parrots have feelings, too. They’re cooped up in a cage, nebach, and we have to feel for them.”
The kids also see how the rebbi models responsibility when he spends his precious early morning hours before school cleaning the room, and caring for the birds, cages and all.
The kids do get attached to the birds, and that’s a useful life lesson, too. Once a male eclectus flew off out an open window, and the students were very upset. That’s when Rabbi Weinstock taught them how to cope with a loss.
Having these birds in the class makes happy children, and a happy mind is an open mind — truly a rebbi and students’ parrot-dise!
Rabbi Yoel Yormark
South Bend Hebrew Day School
Mishawaka, Indiana
28 years in chinuch
What is sweet and satisfying and comes in at least 70 different varieties? If you said Torah (and breakfast cereal) you would be correct.
Rabbi Yoel Yormark remembers the day a seemingly simple parshah lesson turned into a curriculum that’s been downloaded over 2,300 times on Torah Umesorah’s Jewish curriculum materials website, Chinuch.org.
“In 1994 I was teaching the boys about parshas Vayeitzei and explaining how Lavan played a lot of tricks on Yaakov Avinu. I kept saying ‘tricks’ as I described Lavan’s behavior toward his son-in-law. As an aside I told them, ‘Tell your parents to buy you a box of Trix cereal this Shabbos so you’ll remember the parshah.’ ”
Some students loved the directive so much that they begged Rabbi Yormark to continue writing his weekly divrei Torah utilizing Shabbos cereals. He didn’t bite (pun intended), but figuring it was worth a shot to do it for a few parshiyos once in a while, he visited the breakfast foods aisle of his local grocery and created a few more similarly punned divrei Torah. Then, word got around school.
“One day, the principal Mrs. Gettinger asked me, ‘What’s the cereal of the week?’ and it hit me. We really have a program here.” Right then, the Parshah Cereal of the Week was born.
“I saw it as a mission,” says Rabbi Yormark. “On Thursdays I worried if I could come up with a devar Torah that matched a cereal. My criteria was that the name of the cereal and particulars of the sedra had to match. For parshas Toldos, I did Kix.” Why? “When Rivkah is expecting Yaakov and Eisav, she has a very difficult time. When she passes by a yeshivah, Yaakov kicks to come out. When she passes by a place of avodah zarah, Eisav kicks to come out. Yaakov wore kid goatskins so he’d feel like Eisav. When Yitzchak asked Yaakov who he was, he tested him to give him the right answer. Yaakov did all of this because his mother approved it. ‘Kid-tested, mother-approved’ is the slogan for Kix.”
The beauty of the program is that almost every kid loves breakfast cereals and feels connected to it — they’re inspired to read through the parshah to find a connection.
The parshah sheets became the highlight of many homes. A thought question accompanied each sheet, but the program was nice and simple.
“Sometime students gave me ideas for cereals,” Rabbi Yormark says. “One boy begged me to do Cocoa Puffs, his favorite cereal. Together we brainstormed that ‘co’ is like Kohein and the korbanos were puffs of smoke when they were brought. It positively transformed his whole attitude toward school for the rest of the year. Fathers have told me that it gave their sons something to look forward to every week and really awakened their love of school.”
Some week, Rabbi Yormark struggled to find a connection between the parshah and a cereal, but he credits siyata d’Shmaya with helping him through.
“I would go to the store and inevitably, the cereal on the sale rack was the one that I found a connection with. For parshas B’haalosecha, I saw that the Jewish People committed a sin [Cinn-] with complaining about the mahn [-mon], which had given them life in the desert. Cinnamon Life saved the week!”
Aside from learning about the connection when they learn the parshah, the school also offers the parshah cereal for breakfast to grades six through eight on Thursday mornings. Rabbi Yormark avoids cereals with nuts, because of allergies, and dairy, because those cereals aren’t chalav Yisrael.
Rabbi Yormark’s creativity is challenged throughout the year and he discovered an unexpected challenge. “I had to revamp a lot of the curriculum a few years ago when I realized that half the cereals we started with are no longer on the market.”
Rebbeim in Silver Spring, Passaic, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and the Five Towns have called Rabbi Yormark with questions about the program. But the biggest nachas is when his former students come back to tell him that they teach the parshah cereal of the week in their classrooms.
“There is no nachas more delicious than that,” he says.
Rabbi Yitzchok Pollock
Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim — Talmudical Academy
Baltimore, Maryland
35 years in chinuch
& Rabbi Yisroel Pollock
Yeshiva Aharon Yaakov — Ohr Eliyahu
Los Angeles, California
10 years in chinuch
The distance between Rabbi Yitzchok Pollock and his son Reb Yisroel might be a country’s length apart — 2,800 miles — but their relationship couldn’t be closer. Especially when it comes to a magical tool they both utilize to engage their little charges in first and second grade: ventriloquist dummies.
The elder Rabbi Pollock credits his father with his talent.
“My father, Mr. Herbert Pollock, was a dedicated mechanech who held the position of Hebrew school principal in cities like White Plains, Youngstown, and Memphis. His last stint in chinuch was in Chattanooga. Eventually, we moved to Baltimore, where he took on a government job, but he was always the eternal teacher, and he taught and entertained us at home with a simple stuffed animal. We loved how he would use it to talk and teach us parshah at the Shabbos table.”
Following in his father’s footsteps, when he was in high school, Rabbi Pollock ran learning groups for three years in Camp Dora Golding, where he used a teddy bear to teach the lessons. “The kids loved it,” he says.
To bring excitement into his classroom, Rabbi Pollock purchased a “Charlie McCarthy” ventriloquist doll. It was a perfect choice: Velvel, as he named the dummy, was already dressed like a rebbi, replete with a white shirt, black hat, and black pants.
Reb Yitzchok’s son Reb Yisroel wasn’t that much older when he got into ventriloquism. “I grew up with my father’s lines and jokes — he’s really funny! In our house, he’d make the dolls talk, and I still remember my grandfather, even in his old age, entertaining his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
Reb Yisroel’s visit to a toy store at the beginning of his chinuch career found him facing a shelf of puppets.
“I hesitated. I knew I could do it, but I felt that I was taking a leap to do something that my father was mechadeish. I wanted to emulate him, but wondered if I was up to the challenge,” he remembers.
Reb Yisroel didn’t introduce puppets into his classroom immediately.
“Every so often, when I’d cover for another teacher, I’d bring my puppets. Since the name Velvel was taken, my puppet was coined Feivel Pickelovitch. Kids loved it when I brought him out. Unlike my father, I brought Feivel out to teach hilchos Yom Tov or brachos.”
Reb Yitzchok clarifies: “I use Velvel to teach the boys what not to do. I mostly use him to teach parshah. I’ll go over the story, and Velvel will make factual mistakes and act silly, like shuckling funny for davening. The kids think he’s a riot with his errors, and they love correcting him. They also understand that they shouldn’t mimic him.”
Students in Reb Yisroel’s class understand that Feivel makes a lot of mistakes. “It’s a great way to demystify making a mistake and helps clarify a class lesson for boys who might have misunderstood it.”
Do the children understand that the dummies aren’t really speaking?
“I often have kids who tell me, ‘I figured it out, it’s rebbi speaking, not Velvel.’ Kids’ imaginations are incredible; they can drift between reality and fantasy. They really want to believe that the doll is having a conversation, and the lesson seeps into their minds because they’re so relaxed.”
His son adds, “Some boys come over to ask me questions about the doll and they totally relate to him as a person. You can see them making eye contact with the puppet. The students requested that Feivel be included in the class picture that adorned the cover of our Pesach Haggadah.”
Ultimately, puppets are such a successful teaching tool, because everyone — even older kids — are drawn to them.
“I was back in Baltimore one summer, teaching in camp, and I brought my junior high school campers to see my father lead an upsheren using Velvel,” says Reb Yisroel. “These teenage boys were mesmerized. They connected with that place of imagination, even at an age where one might think it’s just not cool anymore.”
Reb Yitzchok reflects: “When you have their attention and teach in a way that makes you, the rebbi, happy, it’s contagious, and you can connect with any student.”
Rabbi Zevi Trenk
Mesivta Chaim Shlomo
Far Rockaway, New York
45 years in chinuch
A ram’s horn still attached to a skull, a pair of cow lungs, and samples of animal feet are the kinds of things you might expect to find in a high school laboratory — or a taxidermist’s office. But in a mesivta beis medrash? Students of Mesivta Chaim Shlomo aren’t fazed by these unusual additions to their classroom, though, especially since the animal parts are used by their beloved, knowledgeable, and uber-enthusiastic menahel, Rabbi Zevi Trenk.
“The first hands-on lesson I remember giving was when I was a counselor in camp, I was teaching hilchos netilas yadayim,” Rabbi Trenk recalls. “Since the room lacked a sink and drain, I brought in a plastic swimming pool to catch the water and demonstrate the different ways to wash, including tevilas yadayim, when a cup isn’t available. That summer I also fabricated a pair of tzitzis out of a tablecloth that was large enough to fit Og Melech HaBashan. When you teach halachah using a hands-on method with hands-on materials, the kids remember what you taught.”
That’s Rabbi Trenk’s method: if something can be taught visually and tactically, it will be remembered. That’s why he has whatever a student might need at the ready, including tefillin sets for Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Nusach Sefard, Teimanim, righties, and lefties, along with the raw hide used to make them.
Props would be an insufficient description of the instruments Rabbi Trenk utilizes. When he began learning Yevamos, he decided he needed to show the bochurim a chalitzah shoe. Not satisfied with simply borrowing or even buying one, Rabbi Trenk set out to learn how to make one himself. He’s happy to lend out his rare item. “When a yeshivah is learning the sugya of Yevamos, or if it’s the daf comes up on Daf Yomi, I’m happy to help.”
But that’s not all! When the boys learned the sugya of mikvaos, Rabbi Trenk built a miniature Plexiglas mikveh to show them how the rainwater enters in a halachic fashion, how to fill it correctly with tap water, and then make it kosher.
Speaking of kosher: “A few years ago, a student met me and reminded me of the importance of a lesson I give until today. I have a set of kosher cow lungs that I keep in a freezer. I blow them up for the students to teach them the laws of kashrus. He told me, ‘To this day, I will never take for granted that Hashem gave me the ability to breathe.’”
The lessons are eternal, and the proof is when the students come back to tell Rabbi Trenk that they remember every lesson. “One former talmid, now a yungerman, presented me with the sefer he wrote about mikvaos,” Rabbi Trenk says proudly. “There is no better litmus test to prove the importance of teaching hands-on than these examples.”
Live These Lessons
Rabbi Menachem Bornstein
Yeshiva Ketana of Long Island, Grade 4
13 years in chinuch
To have the student truly understand the futility of collecting straw for the bricks and mortar the Egyptian taskmasters requested, Rabbi Bornstein brings his students to the school gym. There they find a pile of bricks on display to set the mood. Then Rabbi Bornstein scatters paper clips, which are well camouflaged by the tile floor, all around, and begins screaming orders like the evil overseers. Each boy is expected to find ten clips in 30 seconds. With 20 boys running around, the anxiety and chaos is palpable, allowing them to commiserate with their Jewish ancestors.
Rabbi Eliahu Milstein
Yeshiva Darchei Torah, Grade 4
Far Rockaway, New York
12 years in chinuch
Education isn’t limited to fact memorization. By using a measuring tape and sidewalk chalk, Rabbi Milstein measures the exact actual size and shape of the Mishkan. He then directs the boys to stand on the chalk lines, acting as walls. Rabbi Milstein takes accurately sized keilim and places them where they would rest in the actual Mishkan, including the aron in the Kodesh Hakodoshim. This exercise gives the students a better understanding of parshas Terumah — and of the actual size of the Mishkan, which wasn’t as large as many imagine.
Rabbi Dovid Engel
Toronto Cheder, Menahel of nursery through grade 8
31 years in chinuch
Before Yom Kippur, students in the Toronto Cheder feel like Klal Yisrael on the holiest day of the year. In parshas Achrei Mos, the story of sa’ir l’Hashem and sa’ir l’Azazel is brought to life when Rabbi Mendel Brogna of the COR brings two goats to school. After a lottery is taken, each goat is affixed with an eight-by-ten piece of paper announcing its fate. Unlike the Torah’s description, no animals are sacrificed.
Rabbi Kaganoff’s students don’t just understand the 39 melachos of Shabbos, they perform almost all of them. For example, to create bread, the students start from scratch. First they take wheat stalks that Rabbi Kaganoff purchases. They then thresh, winnow, and grind the grain, before kneading the dough and baking it.
Rabbi Shmuel Beyda
Magen David Yeshiva, Grade 6
Brooklyn, NY
When teaching parshas Ki Sisa, the students learn that 11 spices were used and a special process was executed to make the Ketores. The Machon L’Mikdash sells a set of what is believed to be those spices, minus a few as it is forbidden to make a precise copy of Ketores. Rabbi Beyda grinds equal amounts of each and prepares a “mizbeiach” with very hot coals. A student who is a Kohein is asked to carefully sprinkle the mixture on the coals. The kids get such a kick out of seeing and smelling the column of smoke! Also, when they learned about sha’os zemanim, they made origami sundial watches. Instead of affixing numbers on the watch to determine the time of day, the students put the words “latest zeman Shacharis, latest zeman Shema and latest zeman Minchah.”
Rabbi Yehuda Deutsch
Yeshiva Darchei Torah, Grade 3
18 years in chinuch
Rabbi Deutsch’s 3D-Opoly, an authentic-looking take-off on the Monopoly game, has a nobler goal than Milton Bradley’s: each property on the board represents a different subject taught that year. The “real estate” cards are pure replicas of the real Monopoly game, with locations substituted with subjects. His third-graders play in teams, and they love the game, which provides a comprehensive review of the year’s curriculum. The game is the perfect segue into the summer months, as social skills like conflict-resolution, empathy, and turn-taking are absorbed.
