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Fall Registration for Shalom Explorers

Shalom ExplorersMore Bay Area families are joining together for an exciting learning experience that puts parents in the driver’s seat and offers kids a powerful, fun, and interactive educational environment. Shalom Explorers—a Jewish learning initiative for K–2nd graders that launched last year in Marin, incorporates indoor and outdoor activities based on stories, values, and practices rooted in Jewish tradition.

As a group of Explorer families, parents choose from and customize 34 individual lesson plans. For each learning session, three families choose a role they feel comfortable in—one host, one snack provider, and an educator—and then receive support and materials to carry out the learning journeys for their kids. Parents are transformed from the passive chauffeur dropping off children at a congregation into leading roles in their children's education.

Once a Shalom Explorers group is formed (parents can sign-up to join or create one with existing friends), the Shalom Explorers director meets with the parents to map the children’s learning journey. After parents select the lesson plans they wish to use, a personalized curriculum and the corresponding materials are delivered to the group. As opposed to being limited inside institutional walls, Shalom Explorers uses family homes and the outdoors as its space for learning.

Jewish LearningWorks, a San Francisco-based agency that improves local Jewish learning, oversees Shalom Explorers and is part of a national network with four other communities—known as Shinui, which means “change” in Hebrew—designed to help share and implement new models in part-time Jewish education.

Learn more about Shalom Explorers and sign-up to be an Explorer here. Groups are forming now for all, and registration is open to kids in kindergarten to 2nd grade in Marin and the East Bay.

Shalom Explorers is provided by Jewish LearningWorks, Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay, the Osher Marin JCC, Congregation Kol Shofar and Congregation Rodef Sholom and funded in part by the Covenant Foundation and the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties.