Kriah That Lasts

Rabbi Adi Roland

Walking into class on the first day of school is always an exciting experience.  A new cohort of students and a fresh set of minds to impact, stretch, and mold—what could be better? For the teacher in charge of kriah, however, there is an added, enormous sense of responsibility weighing on our shoulders: to take this new class of illiterate individuals and teach them the skills to be able to read on their own, a lifelong skill that will set them up for success many, many years beyond the one year we have them. Especially when it comes to boys, the kriah teacher’s success with his or her students may well determine whether they will succeed in the rest of their schooling and yeshiva years. 

This was the thought that went through my mind when I began teaching kindergarten to a group of 17 boys ten years ago. It shook me to the core, realizing how awesome a responsibility I had and how serious the ramifications would be, whether I was successful or not. With a heartfelt תפילה for סייעתא דשמיא, I accepted the job and plunged into preparation.  

However, with the typical fervor of a first-year rebbi, freshly returned from ארץ ישראל, I wasn’t content with just purchasing materials and using them with my students; I wanted to create my own curriculum tailored to my students’ needs. I wanted the curriculum to be based on an understanding of how our minds learn how to read, the different methodologies used to teach reading, the challenges that exist, and what our מסורה tells us. The program I developed and have honed over the last decade has several foundational elements that I will describe. It’s a multisensory program that leads to kriah that lasts. It’s also a carefully sequenced program that reduces cognitive load and follows the מסורה of teaching kriah. 

Multisensory Learning: Kriah that Lasts

One idea that has emerged from research into the science of reading is that reading is not in our nature. We can naturally breathe, swallow, hear, see, smell, taste, and feel, but without being taught, one will never learn how to read. This is an important fact because it means that no one is a natural reader, and we can’t rely on students’ natural ability to get them to read; they simply don’t have it. So, how do our minds learn how to read?  

When learning to read, we are, in essence, taking input from our visual and auditory senses and creating new neural pathways that connect those inputs (shapes and sounds), learning to recognize letters, words, and how they sound. At its most basic level, reading involves phonological awareness (sounds and syllables), decoding (letter-sound correspondence), and recognizing familiar words by sight. These are the three basic “threads” at the bottom of Scarborough’s Reading Rope below. We need to keep this in mind because once we understand how the brain works, we can use that knowledge to our advantage when developing a curriculum and teaching our students.

It’s important to state that our goal with kriah instruction is more than teaching children to identify letters and read words. Ultimately, we want our students to be able to see a word and read it automatically, without having to think about it. We want them to be able to read a פסוק in חומש easily and fluently, without having to decode each אות and נקודה. This goes beyond teaching them to recognize letters and remember their associated sounds. 

This kind of automatic fluency comes from developing multiple, rich neural pathways for kriah. Think about how you automatically identify an object like, for example, a banana. When you see it, you recognize its yellow color, or even its distinctive shape in black-and-white profile. In a dark room, you can identify it by feeling its shape or texture, and you can probably identify it by smell. Most of us have extensive experience with bananas, so we’ve built many neural pathways that help us quickly, easily, and automatically identify them. With such a variety of rich neural pathways, identifying objects becomes automatic. 

Usually, people read by sight, and the sense of sound is involved, since the letters and words represent specific sounds. These are the two main senses we use to teach kriah, creating neural pathways through visual and audio stimuli. Often, that’s enough to teach students to read. But what if we could leverage other neural pathways? Can we incorporate into our curriculum the ability for our students to taste a קמץ, feel a וי”ו, or smell the צירי? Especially for students whose audio and visual learning skills are still developing, a multi-sensory approach would tremendously benefit them.

How can kriah teachers incorporate multisensory learning in the classroom?

1. Touch

Use LEGO, playdough, shaving cream, cut-up sandpaper, felt אותיות/נקודות, and individual sandboxes to draw the אותיות/נקודות, etc. There are many materials that can help students manipulate and create the אותיות, נקודות, and words they hear, using their hands and fingers to form them directly, without putting pen to paper. In a centers-based classroom, these ideas can entertain and teach the students for hours without requiring the teacher’s direct input.  

Within this sense, there are also gross- and fine-motor activities you can do. For gross-motor, there is נקודות hopscotch and sandbag-toss-into-the-correct-נקודה basket. For fine-motor there is pin-the-נקודה-on-the-אות, magnetic אותיות and נקודות, pebble and toothpick אותיות and נקודות, etc. There are plenty of other ideas online for these activities as well. The more experiential activities and movement we can incorporate into our classrooms, the better we equip our students with successful kriah skills. And just think about how these activities can do wonders for the more sensory-seeking students!

2. Movement

One area where students have had a lot of success is that every נקודה has a hand signal.  There are different versions out there, and you can totally do something on your own that makes sense, but it’s a powerful tool to give your students when they’re beginning their identification of נקודות. The more movement done when trying to identify a נקודה, again, the more neural pathways are opened, making it easier to identify it in the future. Besides, it’s fun and the students enjoy it! When employed with students, you will often see them go through the various hand motions on their own to identify a נקודה they have forgotten. (Hand signals also work really well when teaching trop to a בר מצוה boy!)

3. Taste

When a boy has an upsherin and we put honey or sugar on an אל”ף בי”ת chart for him to lick, this is not only to teach him that kriah and learning are sweet; this is also meant to expand the boy’s experiential senses when it comes to learning. When it comes to kriah, there are limits to how you can incorporate taste, but a few examples could be that during a Shabbos or birthday party, the students can make the נקודות out of Twizzlers, put the chocolate ball/button in the right place to make בּ ב, כּ כ, שׁ שׂ, etc.  And, of course, let them eat their creations afterward! Again, we are expanding those neural pathways for our students, and they will definitely remember those activities long after they leave school.

Kamatz Alef – Ah

Although multisensory learning helps build neural pathways that lead to automatic fluency, the main method of instruction, and indeed reading, is through sight: seeing the letters and words on the page. In my curriculum, this means lots of worksheets, and a few important elements in the design help reduce cognitive load for early readers. 

The first element is how נקודות are introduced. There are two general approaches to teaching נקודות:

• Teach נקודות as vowel sounds, almost like another letter, that has a name and sound (kamatz=/ah/)
• Teach נקודות as the blended sound they make when combined with a letter (kamatz alef=/ah/)

Both methods have their proponents, but having worked with both, I’ve come to prefer the latter for the following reasons: 

1. Consider the mental processes involved in reading a letter with a נקודה for an early reader. They must identify the letter from a bank of 33 possibilities (including the sofios) and recall its sound; identify the נקודה from a bank of 10 and recall its sound; and then blend those sounds, which, on its own, is an advanced skill. When taught the second way, they develop the ability to identify letter-נקודה combinations and learn to blend them as part of that skill. With this approach, blending is explicitly taught, reducing cognitive overload later when they’re reading. 
2. The second approach presents more opportunity for explicit instruction about some of the more nuanced skills with blending, such as multiple-syllable letters, open-syllable words (ones that end with אל”ף, ה”א, or עי”ן), and closed-syllable words.  These skills are initially taught in an environment that is less identification-heavy than when reading full words. Closing and opening syllables are among the more difficult skills students learn, and when we remove unnecessary hurdles, they can spend more energy on them.
3. This method is more closely aligned with our מסורה. Traditionally, קמץ is introduced underneath all the אותיות, then פתח under all the אותיות, etc.

Sequence of Introduction

The second important design element is the careful sequence in which נקודות are introduced. I modeled our sequence after the popular kriah book used in חדרים in ארץ ישראל called הסולם, which employs this methodology to great success:

1. The students are taught one נקודה at a time.  
2. Then, they are taught to blend that נקודה with all the letters.
3. Then, they are taught to blend one syllable with an אל”ף, ה”א, or עי”ן at the end, the skill of blending an open syllable. 
4. Then, they are taught to blend one syllable with a closed letter at the end, the skill of blending a closed syllable. 
5. Then, they are taught to blend two letters, meaning two syllables, with the same נקודה underneath both letters as an open syllable word.
6. Finally, they are taught to blend two letters (again, two syllables) with the same נקודה underneath both letters as a closed syllable word.  
7. This same sequence is used for the next נקודה. 
8. After mastering all the steps for the second נקודה, they are taught to read two syllables with different נקודות.
9. Next, the third נקודה is taught, following steps 1-6. 
10. Once each נקודה is mastered individually, it is then blended with the previous נקודות in multisyllable blending, like in step 8. 
11. This process continues for all ten נקודות. 

The Teacher

The final and most important piece of teaching kriah is the teacher. Rebbi or morah, young or old, it doesn’t matter—the excitement and enthusiasm they bring into the classroom will have the biggest impact on their students’ kriah learning. The teacher-talmid connection goes all the way back to מעמד הר סיני, and teachers are the link to connect our דור to the future דורות of כלל ישראל and their beginning journey of being עובדי ה’. It is through them that the פסוק in ישעיה that we say every day in davening is being fulfilled in real time: לא ימושו מפיך ומפי זרעך ומפי זרע זרעך אמר ה’ מעתה ועד עולם.  

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Rabbi Adi Roland resides in Cincinnati, OH, and is currently the Learning Center rebbi for Cincinnati Hebrew Day School, where he has worked for the past 10 years.  His primary focus is on meeting students’ needs and working together with rebbeim to create skills curricula and optimize each classroom’s learning environment.  He is especially passionate about teaching kriah, both to children and adults. 

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