RELIGIOUS SCHOOL

Children love coming to learn at Temple Beth David. They love their teachers and their rabbi and cantor. Whether we are acting out the weekly portion, doing prayerobics or creating digital presentations on the cities of Israel we are doing it with joy. More than creating positive Jewish memories, we empower our children through joyful Judaism to create their own memories.

At Temple Beth David, learning is crafted with an appreciation for each child's unique approach, pace, and style of learning and developmentally appropriate goals that both support and challenge the learner. Each child has a Personalized Learning Plan that tailors our school’s curriculum to the child’s needs and strengths. 

Students are encouraged to set personal learning goals, and the regular assessment that is typically a part of personalized learning initiatives enables the student to receive regular feedback on their progress. Research demonstrates that positive feedback such as the progression toward a chosen goal is highly motivating to students. Additionally, students who track their own progress toward these goals are more likely to make greater gains toward reaching their goals than students who do not.

When God gave the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai they responded, "Na'ase V'nishma - we will do and we will understand." As Jews we understand that learning happens through doing. At Temple Beth David we create real-time, real-life Jewish learning and living - t’fillah (prayer), shabbat and haggis (holidays), mitzvot (commandments) and tikun olam (repairing the world).

​Because children learn in different ways our program is structured to offer multiple modalities of learning: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile. Students are challenged to see their learning not only for its own sake but as a tool for living and growing as Jews and Americans in the 21st century.

We see relationships as the core of Jewish life. Through building relationships we bring meaning to our studies and see ourselves as part of a larger community of lifelong learners. And so while we honor each child's unique learning path we also strive to help them build relationships with their faith, their friends, their community, the Jewish people and God. 

We are especially interested in nurturing a relationship with the Divine; helping each child share radical amazement at the world and appreciate the spark of divinity in each person and everything.

Learning at Temple Beth David is goal oriented and mastery-based. We work with our students and families to set challenging learning targets and then assess students on an ongoing basis through both formative and summative assessments to help students reach their learning goals and show mastery. 

In our radically connected world, content is readily available and so our focus is on helping students build a skill set that will allow them to access and interpret information, feel confident with Jewish ritual and tradition and find their own voice in the eternal conversation between God and the Jewish people through Torah and sacred text. 

Our program is structured around learning communities (קְהִילוֹת - Kehillot) that allow students to learn from one another, see where their learning is going, serve as mentors and role models and allow teachers to collaborate.

A multiage classroom is not the same as a multi-grade classroom where students are still taught as separate grade levels even though they are in the same room.  Multiage classrooms use flexible grouping and differentiate instruction according to each child’s needs without distinguishing students by grade level.

At Temple Beth David we have four learning communities (קְהִילוֹת - Kehillot) each with a teaching team of two teachers and one assistant. Meet our teachers.