SKOKIE, IL — How much Hebrew can an American preschooler pick up over the course of a six-week summer camp?
Chicago-Area Camp Shows Children are Never Too Young to Learn Hebrew
SKOKIE, IL — How much Hebrew can an American preschooler pick up over the course of a six-week summer camp?
The answer, according to Zeesy Posner, is quite a lot.
Reached just before the end of the inaugural year of the Hebrew immersion summer camp she ran, Posner, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Skokie, Ill., reports that the two dozen campers of Keitana B’Ivrit – a branch of the worldwide Camp Gan Israel network of summer camps – are comfortable and confident in a language most of them had very little knowledge of before June.
“Preschoolers can totally go with the flow, and have no problem with two languages,” says Posner, who runs the camp as a unit of her larger 150-strong Camp Gan Israel of Skokie.
Educators have known for quite some time the truth in Posner’s remarks, but the Chabad-Lubavitch emissary says that to her knowledge, a Hebrew-language summer camp for young English-speaking children just didn’t exist before her program’s founding. Other camps across North America offer programs in everything from French and Spanish to Italian and Chinese, but Hebrew immersion – where the camp’s entire staff of counselors and group leaders are native Hebrew speakers – is a rarity.
