By Joanna Kadish, other
The autumn wind blows circles around the stalwart evergreens and thin birches bordering Interlaken Boulevard on Capitol Hill, causing the more flexible trees to undulate, their branches swaying with a rich swishing of sound. Adding to the orchestra of leafy music is the happy fanfare of pre-school children’s voices coming from the playground next to the majestic Seattle Hebrew Academy.
The preschool occupies the only classrooms in use at the school since the Nisqually Earthquake forced SHA students out of the older sections of the building and into portables. The Stroum Jewish Community Center has run the preschool at SHA for the past two years. This partnership has been made possible in part by an additional allocation from the Jewish Federation Community Campaign.
Back inside after morning recess, about a dozen four-year-olds swarm around Bayla Friedman Treiger, head teacher in the pre-K class, some asking about the noise they heard of a tree falling in the nearby forest. “The winds were racing, the clouds were racing, and the whole tree fell,” explains Treiger to the children around her, their anticipation of a wonderful story clearly apparent. “If it’s really so windy that a tree could fall, it’s time to come in anyway.”
“Fall is called s’tav,” says Chani Cohen, the Hebrew immersion teacher, hired last year as a result of the partnership between the JCC and Seattle Hebrew Academy. The children repeat the word and Cohen asks one of the children in Hebrew to pull a chair out for a classmate; the child complies. Treiger adds, “By the time they’re four, they know their primary colors in English and Hebrew; we’re working on learning the names of shades like blue-green and lavender but all within the context of the Torah portion or holiday we’re doing.”
Parents and teachers are unanimous in their commendation of the partnership between Seattle Hebrew Academy and the JCC. Teachers at the preschool say the JCC has brought more resources and funding to the program at the Seattle Hebrew Academy. Among the JCC’s most visible services has been the bringing together of young families from the far-flung Jewish community on all sides of Lake Washington. In the words of Evelyn Cohanim, whose four-and-a-half-year -old is enrolled, “Putting together the Seattle Hebrew Academy and the JCC was a good idea, and it’s an outstanding program.” Adds Lorre Goldberg, who has two girls in the program, “The Mercer Island preschool was full so I came here and I’m really happy I did.”
Not only is the secular part of the education of a higher caliber, but the religious aspect has been integrated seamlessly in a similar manner. As Cohanim, who moved her child from another preschool to the Seattle Hebrew Academy, puts it, “I really believe the teacher makes a real difference, and Bayla uses a good methodology. I’m a teacher, so I have some ideas about what works and I give them a lot of credit. My four year-old had homework; she had to bring in objects by “˜twos.’ It was Tuesday, they were studying Noah’s Ark and they were studying “˜twos.’”
A clinical social worker with a 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter at the Seattle Hebrew Academy adds that she is especially impressed that the kids are learning about the story of Noah and about the science of rain and flooding on the computer. “I don’t know if I could find that in other preschools,” says Theresa Rogers. “The teachers are up on all the latest thinking in education, and it shows.”
Rogers said her family is Reform and doesn’t keep kosher but she wants her children to be acquainted with all the possibilities, so she looked for a venue that would allow them to view the complexity of their religion and feel its textured variety. She says, “There’s a real attention to Judaism here — my daughter is learning to enjoy the variety of ways everyone interprets the Torah; Bayla is very accepting.”
Cohanim, who does keep kosher, concurs: “They learn the same prayers [as other Jewish preschools], but here it’s not an in-your-face kind of thing, the way they teach religion.”
Cohanim adds that she is impressed by the “enormous” amount of supplies and resources that are made available to the children.
“Communication is key,” Cohanim says. “Bayla sends out weekly newsletters explaining everything so even people without a lot of religious training can understand.” Cohanim points out that Treiger’s rule about parents signing kids in and out “forces us to connect with the teachers.”
During the summer, JCC preschool staff from all four sites, Mercer Island, Bellevue, the Northend and the Hebrew Academy, do in-service training together and during the school year directors meet on a regular basis to discuss programs and systems, and to discover what works and what doesn’t. Dana Weiner, JCC’s early childhood services director for the Mercer Island and Bellevue campuses, and now the Hebrew Academy site, says, “Each program pursues the same goals and there are guidelines, but the teachers do fashion the curriculum to the neighborhood.” The pilot Hebrew immersion program, financed by an anonymous donor to the JCC, is currently only offered at the Seattle Hebrew Academy campus. The JCC preschool on Mercer Island is considering adding a similar program to be funded by the same donor.
In Treiger’s four-year-old’s class, the kids are dancing around, playing a game of washing themselves for Shabbat. Treiger, who held an imaginary hose, says, “Let me check the water,” before pretending to squirt the kids, who squeal and jump higher, with big smiles all around. “This feels great,” says one child. Treiger adds a cautionary note: “Don’t forget to wash your belly buttons.”
Later that day, as they hear the Torah’s version of how God formed the earth, the class talks about light and darkness while eating chocolate pudding to represent darkness and learning the word v’choshech, with vanilla pudding symbolizing light (or in Hebrew.) Treiger explains, “Each day we talk about what the Torah says God did, combining storytelling with song.”