Reflecting on what I wrote in my last post, about teaching children to learn to read Hebrew, got me thinking about my time teaching year 12 olds Hebrew reading at a Hebrew and Religion school. The class was divided into a few groups.

Group 1: the children who knew how to read Hebrew fast; group 2: the children who knew how to read Hebrew (not particularly fast, but could read comfortably); group 3: the children who didn’t know how to read in Hebrew, but came to class eager to learn and were full of questions, the main question they had on their lips was “how do you read in Hebrew?”, they were such a pleasure to teach as they wanted to learn.

Then finally, there was a group of about 6 kids who really weren’t interested in learning to read Hebrew – they were my greatest challenge.  My personal goal was for them to start reading in Hebrew slowly and fluently.

Interestingly enough, I achieved my goal by simply starting the lesson with everyone repeating after me: “Hebrew is easy, Hebrew is easy”. Those three simple words changed their attitude, and by the end of the year they were reading in Hebrew fluently.