This author's work has been informed and influenced by two individuals, Marion Green and Dr. Joshua Jacobson.
Marion Green is a prominent Jewish educator in the Boston, Massachusetts area specializing in teaching individuals with special needs, creating and modifying materials for her students to aid them in learning and mastering Hebrew reading, and instructing other teachers in the field of Jewish Special Needs at Hebrew College. She developed an method for teaching Hebrew reading to individuals with special needs using a series of flash cards.
Since 2018 in agreement with Marion Green and Gateways:Access to Jewish Education this author has taken over the production and sale of these flash cards. They are available for sale on this web-site.
Each card has a picture of a Hebrew letter, vowel or special combination on the front adorned with a colored emblem that incorporates the shape of the letter or vowel. The back of each card has an associated mnemonic that describes the emblem on the front using the sound of the Hebrew letter or vowel. As students master the mnemonics for each lesson, they are given a set of approximately seventy practice reading words that help reinforce the information on the new flash cards, while at the same time scaffolding the sound-symbol associations established in previous lessons. After mastering all the flash cards and successfully demonstrating mastery of the practice words, students are given prayers and Torah texts to read and chant.
Green developed a method of modifying Hebrew texts in DavkaWriter, sometimes simplifying the spelling of the words in the prayers, such as removing the silent yud and inserting extra space between words, in order to aid the students with special needs to more easily isolate each word visually on the page. Moreover, she inserted a space between each audible syllable to further aid the student to achieve correct vocalization of the text. Often, she would color the vowels by hand according to the system introduced in her flash cards or insert small pictures above the consonants according the emblems on her flash cards. As an intern in one of her special needs classes, this author learned her methods and observed how effective they were with students, who could not be educated in typical supplementary Hebrew School or Jewish day school settings.
Dr. Joshua Jacobson, as noted in the previous section, is the author of "Chanting the Hebrew Bible - The Complete Guide to the Art of Cantillation and its companion "Chanting the Hebrew - Student Edition". He was a tenured faculty member at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts until 2019 and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Hebrew College.
His books illuminate the relationship of each disjunctive ta'am by diagramming its associated phrase with respect to its level of grammatical importance in any Biblical verse. In Biblical texts, each word is punctuated with a ta'am positioned above or below the first letter of the stressed syllable. If that letter has a vowel under or over it, the ta'am is placed to the left of the vowel. By contrast, in English punctuation marks are placed immediately before a word (such as an opening quote or opening parenthesis), immediately after a word (such as a period, closing parenthesis, or question mark), or inside a word (such as an apostrophe).
Each ta'am conveys three pieces of information:
By knowing which te'amim - the plural of ta'am - are combined to create complete phrases within a verse, one can get a sense of the overall grammatical structure of each verse. Anyone who has learned to diagram English phrases according to subject, object, and preposition phrases can relate to this method. Jacobson adapted a method, that was described by Israeli author Michael Perlman in his book "Dappim Lelimud Ta'amey Ha'mikra" (Jacobson, Chanting the Hebrew Bible, p. 36), to illustrate the function of each ta'am. "The key to the whole system of cantillation [is] syntax, or sentence structure. The te'amim [punctuation marks] serve as an elaborate system that clarifies ambiguities in meaning." (Susan Miron, quoting Jacobson in "The Science of Torah-Chanting", published in The Forward on April 18, 2003). While it is ideal to understand the words one is chanting, it is possible to gain a sense of the text by knowing when and how much to pause after each phrase.