Benchmarks

Kriah Benchmarks and understanding their importance

1. Kriah is the foundation for ALL Torah learning:

Every major text a student will encounter, from a Siddur and Chumash to Mishnah and Gemara (Talmud), requires proficient Hebrew reading. A student struggling to decode words will face an immense barrier to accessing and understanding these texts, making advanced learning nearly impossible.

The point at which reading reaches a certain threshold and they are able to concentrate on the comprehension and not the struggle to read is called Automaticity. 

Analogy: Think of the brain like a computer with a limited amount of RAM (working memory). If a student does not have automaticity, 90% of their "RAM" is being used just to figure out what the words are (decoding). They only have 10% left over to actually understand what the sentence means. When a student has automaticity, decoding takes up only 5% of their RAM, leaving 95% free to focus on comprehension, inference, and critical thinking.

Setting benchmarks for words per minute will make sure your students are reaching automaticity. Achieving automaticity means they can now spend their energy on comprehension and higher level learning.

2. Early identification of learning issues:

Benchmarks provide objective data that moves beyond a rebbe or teacher's "gut feeling." If a first-grader isn't meeting the benchmark for blending letters and vowels, it is an immediate red flag. This allows schools to intervene early with targeted remediation before the gap widens and becomes much harder to close in later grades. To further evaluate struggling students see the remediation sections.

3. Keeps everyone on the same page with shared metric and goals:

This might be the most important reason why using benchmarks is important. Without a shared metric and clear goals, each rebbe or teacher in the different grades spends time on kriah and hopes for the best – with each one assuming (hoping?) that he or she is doing a good job. When in 5th grade, 35% of the grade isn’t reading properly, no one really knows who dropped the ball. Rebbeim have material content that they are supposed to cover and they are always stretched for time to make sure to cover their limudim, some of which might be more interesting than yet again more kriah review. The individual rebbe doesn’t really have a way of measuring if enough time is spent on kriah.

Benchmarks allow you to see if the kriah program is being implemented properly – and if not, identify when/where things are falling behind. There are school across America who have outstanding kriah programs, but without active oversight, rebbeim might be skipping half the review sheets under pressure to finish yom tov related curricula and other programs. Having clear benchmarks across the school with details for the different grade levels makes it much easier to track improvement and to provide incentive/feedback to the rebbe regarding time spent on kriah.

Kriah (Hebrew reading) is a cumulative skill. Any student who does not reach these minimum benchmarks has not fully mastered the foundational skills required for the next level. Without these fundamentals, students will likely struggle as the material becomes more complex. 

Note: If a student is missing these targets, please refer to the Remediation Section for targeted exercises and solutions.

1st Year of Kriah Introduction

• Aleph Beis - (33 letters on a mixed sheet) in 48 seconds.

2nd year of Kriah

• Aleph Beis (33 letters) in 25–30 seconds. Once a student masters letter-vowel blends, their brain processes their raw Aleph Beis speed as a side effect.

• Knowledge of all nekudos sounds - Sounds vs. names of nekudos vary as per institution - whatever your policy is fine

Next Level - Mastery/Fluency of Open sounds (letter + nekudah blends)

• Realize that this level is very important for kriah. Teachers/parents often skip to words. When a kid is struggling with these open sounds, he will have a very hard time with words. Once a struggling student masters all 246 blends in this benchmark, he reads words with much more ease as all the components of the words are almost like sight words. 

• Open Sounds Benchmark - 18 letter and nekudah blends in 11–13 seconds. - There are approximately 246 blends that need to be mastered. Often, this benchmark has to do with pacing and crispness more than speed.- Click here to generate open sound review/assessment sheets

Mastery of Words (WPM)

• Before we talk about Sheva rules, which most of them, kids pick up intuitively and are not all followed in our davening, we need words to come together nicely. See the remediation section for ways to make this happen, but hopefully, if you have done the open sounds properly, words should progress nicely.