BeYachad

Historic Meeting of BeYachad Partners in North America

For the first time, lay leaders and staff representing all of BeYachad's partners, met this May in San Francisco.  The meeting was an opportunity to review BeYachad's achievements, challenges, and future goals.  It also was an opportunity for partners to discuss additional ways to cooperate in order to advance their common agendas in the region.  Thank you to all who helped in the organization and hosting of the meetings.  Following is a list of all of the attendees:

Members of the Israel and Overseas Committee of the Jewish Community Federation (JCF) of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties:

Sheldon Wolfe

Maureen Samson

Eve Bernstein

Sora Lei Newman

Carol van Wijnen

Deborah Mintz

Linda Brownstein, Chair

Annette Dobbs

Brian Perlman

Evan Traeger-Muney

Orli Rinat

Barbara Farber

Anat Pilovsky

Liki Abrams

Roseanne Levitt

Brian Lurie

JCF Staff

Tom Dine, Executive Director

Gila Noam, Israel Officer Director

Dawne Bear-Novicoff, Israel and Overseas Director

Julie Gold, Israel and Overseas Associate

IVN Staff

Ayelet Tal

Joni Block

Ilan Hadas

Anat Farkas

IVN Board members

Itsik Danziger

Benny Levin

Partner representatives

Mordechay Cohen, Sacta-Rashi Foundation

Michael Biton, Coordinator for Planning and Development, United Israel Apeeal Canada, Jerusalem office

Rick Schreiber, National Chair, Coast to Coast Canada-Galilee Panhandle, Partnership 2000

Mark Gurvis, Executive Director, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver

The Singapore Math Project at Metsudot Elementary School in Kiryat Shemona

Watching children who are thrilled about learning is an exciting experience.  Finding children who are thrilled to learn math is absolutely mesmerizing. 

Recently, an adult leadership delegation from the Jewish Federation of Ottawa had the opportunity to witness such an event in the framework of their visit to Kiryat Shemona. 

The Singapore Math Program has been running in Israel for three years and 30,000 children have already benefited from the program.  At the Metsudot School, six classes of grades one to three take part in the program, which aims to bring Israeli children back to the International level in mathematics that they once held.

This program, supported by the BeYachad Initiative, trains schools and teachers to implement a math curriculum developed originally in Singapore, the leader in international math test results, that brings life and excitement to learning these elementary skills.  For more information on the basics of the Singapore Math Program, visit www.ifma.org.il/english .

“Children are not afraid to take chances,” said Moshe Reign, an ex-Systems Analyst turned teacher and proponent of the Singapore program.  “Math is a foreign language, and they need to take risks.”

The class opens with warm up exercises, where it is already clear that the children want to participate and to be heard.  The system teaches them step by step and makes learning math a positive experience.  When the teacher says he wants to give them something difficult, a challenging question, a cheer rises up from the children ready for anything he may throw their way. 

They not only learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but, for example, the difference between left and right.  “One of the problems that children have with math,” said Reign, “is coordination, and that’s connected to learning left from right.”

In a comparative test in which Kiryat Shemona and Tel Aviv schools participated, the Kiryat Shemona school working with the Singapore curriculum came in first (while the other schools of Kiryat Shemona came in last).

The faces of the second grade children, who know how to solve exercises that most children are only learning in grades three and four, say it all.  They have confidence and skills and want to come to class.