In frum schools, what exactly is meant by "kriah"?

jj1236

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 10:35 am

I teach 3rd grade at a right wing MO school and we have a kriah teacher who comes twice a week for 10 minutes and teaches them kriah skills. She also assigns them kriah hw 3 nights a week which is readinga sheet with a pragraph of tehillim or psukim which focus on the skills they were taught that week. She also tests them twice a year to see if they are on grade level or not in terms of fluency and accuracy.

amother

Violet

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 11:31 am

There's a lot of new research now showing that literacy is a huge huge factor in learning and education at all levels- being able to read more fluently and accurately at a quicker pace greatly impacts your level of education at a higher level. Especially in Hebrew as a second language. So there is more focus on "kriah" as a subject not just in 1st grade to learn how to read, but to practice accuracy and fluency over the next few years as well. This continues working up to reading Hebrew without nekudos and Rashi script as well. More of a focus on these things as impacting all aspects of learning as a whole in the last few years based on the research.

amother

Purple

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 12:23 pm

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

I guess I'm just puzzled that this is an issue at all: are there RW schools where kids, say by the time they reach fourth grade, aren't perfectly fluent readers of Hebrew?

There absolutely are.

My 10 year old (just finished 4th grade) and my 12 year old (just finished 6th) both struggle.

My 12 year old struggles with reading and schoolwork in general, but my 10 year old is reading English many grade levels above her age, is exceptionally bright, but the Hebrew means nothing to her so she bumbles over and through it.

There is a lot of guessing with both of them. they look at the word and just give it their best estimate. It means nothing to them so they just don't care.

I think part of the problem is that the school they go to translates chumash into Yiddish and then English for the first few years. Which makes it impossible for them to start making connections between the Hebrew and English and start to recognize words.

If you're just doing Hebrew and English, you start to see how shorashim play out, how many words are used again and again, and it starts to decode itself.

When you do Hebrew - then struggle through some Yiddish reading which you also don't understand - before you finally get to the English, that process is totally disrupted.

I wish my kids could go to the school I went to growing up (other side of the world), but for where we are now, this is our only option.

It bothers me very much.

ectomorph

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 1:48 pm

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

I've seen the term "kriah" used in chinuch contexts. For example, in one of the Lakewood school threads, there was a discussion of whether some Lakewood schools for girls were more or less advanced than BYBP for kriah.

Kriah means reading, so I thought kriah as a school subject referred to learning how to read Hebrew. I'm having trouble understanding how this is a subject for more than one academic year. I figure that depending on a school's curriculum, students learn it in kindergarten or first grade. But Hebrew is a phonetic language, and once you learn the sounds of the letters and the nekudot, that's it, or so I would think. How is it an ongoing subject?

For boys, does it refer also to learning how to lein with trope?

Thanks in advance for explaining.

Kriah means reading. There are always a few laggers in every class. Because of the importance of Hebrew reading fluency (being non fluent is highly correlated with going OTD, according to a JO article I once read) kriah is sometimes taught separately to ensure that no one falls thru the cracks.

amother

Blush

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 1:56 pm

jj1236 wrote:

With my girls kriya is a daily part of the curriculum and homework is every night. Besides for shva they work on speed, mistakes, fluency, havara.

Both my girls and boys for sure through 3rd grade are pulled out once a week and tested one on one. The girls school is more intense.

Davening isn’t great practice. Anything you know already it’s hard to reteach. Like shema is hard to break all the bad habits kids have who say shema since 2. My sons in primary stop saying whole shema in school in hopes when they start saying it again they will break some of their bad habits.

I think bad Kriah has been blamed for kids doing barely in school. So a very strong emphasis has been placed on perfection.

My 4th and 2nd grader both have kriah homework 4x week over the summer.

JoyInTheMorning

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 4:28 pm

ectomorph wrote:

Yes, I know that kriah means reading. (Of course. Just because I am MO does not mean that I am ignorant. On the contrary, learning chumash and other parts of tanach with mefarshim, Jewish philosophy, halacha, and gemara is a central part of my life. I learn constantly. I give Divrei Torah. It's a part of me.)

What puzzled me is the following:

(1) Certainly "kriah" couldn't possibly mean being able to understand what you are saying -- what I think is usually referred to as "decoding" -- because understanding complex Hebrew text in depth is beyond the scope of a child who is not fluent in Hebrew, which is most kids in Yeshiva in the U.S.

(2) Reading Hebrew should be easy because it is phonetic.

What I've realized from the discussion -- thank you all! -- is that there are many aspects of reading Hebrew that I was not considering, including subtleties of pronunciation (shva na vs shva nach), havarah, and fluency.

JoyInTheMorning

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 4:31 pm

Mama Bear wrote:

Tangentially related, in chasidishe schools they also have to teach the girls to read and spell in Yiddish. Which is a whole skill in itself bc it's without nekudos.

But reading Yiddish is still reasonably easy compared to English because you have a fairly straightforward mapping from certain letters/combinations to sounds. Ayin is like the segol ("eh"), two yods is the A or I sound depending on whether you're a litvak or a chassid, etc.

I do realize that learning to spell is a whole other skill and can be quite difficult.

JoyInTheMorning

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 4:36 pm

amother [ Blush ] wrote:

I think your points about bad habits are spot on. I was absolutely horrified to see my kids mistakes not being corrected in kindergarten. They were so reinforced after a few months that I had to be very strict about not allowing those mistakes again. That was also why, when we practiced in the summer, I used a text like Pirkei Avot, which they were not familiar with previously. And I was a martinet, making sure that it was learned correctly.

But I'm still thinking that this should not be that big a deal if it is learned correctly early on. It's the acceptance of mistakes that sets kids up for failure later. It's as if you taught addition and turned a blind eye when a kid said 2+3 is 6. You can't let that pass, because the whole foundations are rotten then.

So I get what some of you are saying about your experiences with kids not being fluent, but I'm thinking that the foundations are not taught correctly to start with. That is a real shame.

keym

Fri, Aug 09 2019, 5:04 pm

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

The biggest problems are the tefillos and brachos taught to kids pre-reading. Ask any 5 year old the words to shma or modeh ani.
Similar to the elemeno in the abc song or the dawnzer in the Star Spangled Banner.