Jewish Living and Learning

JECEI was created to respond to the need for Jewish early childhood education to engage families in ongoing Jewish connections and to provide excellent early childhood education. It has created and is implementing an innovative national strategy to transform Jewish early childhood education practices in North America with a strong commitment to promoting Jewish values and ideas and engaging parents and families in Jewish life, learning and celebration.

JECEI uses several processes to increase the engagement of families in Jewish living and learning and they include:

• JECEI Leadership Team whose members include educators and parents
• Interactive family events with Jewish learning opportunities for adults
• Parent-teacher study groups
• Ongoing adult Jewish learning in parents’ homes

JECEI works with the educators to increase their capacity to engage families Jewishly by:

• Helping teachers make visible to parents the children’s learning about Jewish life
• Conducting seminars on partnering with parents
• Facilitating the teacher’s study of the lenses to deepen their knowledge and incorporate Jewish living into the classroom
• Collaborating on professional growth experiences to bring JECEI lenses into the classroom