Classroom Chatter September 16

On Friday, students in Grades Four through Eight participated in an assembly to commemorate the events of 9/11/01. The program began with the Pledge of Allegiance and the recitation of a perek of Tehillim. The students then made a timeline of their typical day and compared it to the timeline of 9/11; they also listened to paragraphs about the day written and read by some of our eighth grade students. In addition, the students made cards for a soldier from Lincoln, RI, who was injured in Afghanistan. The program ended with the PHDS Middle School Band playing our National Anthem. We thank Mrs. Uyttebroek, who ran the assembly, Rabbi Lapin, who led the school in the recitation of Tehillim, and Mr. Rosenfield, who prepared our band members to play the National Anthem. The NEAT students attended a similar program on Thursday prepared by Mrs. Uyttebroek. The assemblies were featured in an article about upcoming commemorations of 9/11 in last week’s edition of The Jewish Voice and Herald.

Pre-K is learning about the upcoming holiday of Rosh Hashanah.  We have made shofros and are finishing a special apple and honey dish to use at our Yom Tov table.  We especially look forward to hearing the shofar being blown every day, counting the days until Rosh Hashanah, and singing our special Rosh Hashanah songs.

Kindergarten has begun the learning of Alef-Bais.  We have already completed our alef folders and played some class alef games, such as “Shimon Omair” (Simon Says) and "I Took a Trip to Eretz Yisrael on an Aveerone (airplane)."  We had a big celebration on Erev Shabbos to mark this important event. 

The fifth graders have begun to learn the sequence of events that led up to Krias Yam Suf (the splitting of the Red Sea). They were quite impressed with the middle school students, when Mrs. Yudkowsky randomly asked some students who were standing in the hall near the fifth grade classroom to recite a few of those events and the days on which they occurred. They did a great job! In fact, other middle schoolers heard about this and offered to recite the entire sequence! Another fifth grader went home and asked her older siblings if they knew this information, and they answered in the affirmative. B’ezras Hashem, in just a short time, the current fifth graders will be joining the ranks of all PHDS students who can