My youngest child has begun second grade (where did the time go?), and while that may not seem like the most momentous change that is happening in my house this school year - our oldest has headed to high school, after all - in some ways this is a game-changing moment that is about to take place. Why? What earth-shattering learning happens in second grade that is more important than that which is learned in 6th or
I first fell in love with Gemara Berura a dozen years ago. I had just finished my most ambitious project-based learning assignment I had ever attempted with my 9th grade class. We designed a “How To Learn Gemara” website. In this project, my students culminated a year of a careful skills-based approach to learning Gemara by summarizing the various Sugiyot they had learned complete with keywords and color coding. They