Family Education

Temple Israel’s Philosophy of Family Education:

• Family Education recognizes that the most effective Jewish teachers are parents, family, and peers. Empowering parents, individuals and families to explore their own Jewish journeys to leverage the impact of the formal classroom experience.
• Family Education focuses on concrete, experiential learning, taking education outside the classroom into a variety of informal settings. As such, Family Education serves an integrative, community-building function, bringing people together in settings that cross boundaries of age, school, and traditionally defined groups.
• Family Education is the lens through which we can best achieve our goal of creating a curriculum of Jewish living.
• Temple Israel defines “Family” as broadly as possible, including every age and stage of life.
  

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  Family education is a central theme in our Temple's comprehensive program for life-long learning. We provide a variety of programming to help each member grow and develop his/her Jewish identity. The programs provide opportunities for each individual to acquire tools for Jewish living and to ensure the transmission of Jewish knowledge and values from one generation to the next. Some family education programs are based on the cycle of the Jewish year. Others focus on stages of human development. Parents with both small and grown children can study together with their children, experiencing and exploring Jewish ritual, Bible, or ethics. Nursery school families can participate in the "Parent Connection" which is an opportunity to share books with Judaic content and prepared guide questions. Our older nursery school families participate in a "Jewish Super Heroes" series that enables them to learn about biblical heroes, to incorporate Jewish values into their daily lives and to make a variety of holiday-related crafts. Each religious school grade has an opportunity to bring parents into the classroom to study Torah, Jewish holidays, prayers, and life-cycle events.