What Happened in Grades 4-6 on Sunday, February 28...

Grade 4

We started our day in T'filah. Cantor welcomed us with the opening prayers and Rabbi was back with us after his sabbatical! Rabbi talked to us about this week’s Torah portion, Vayachel. In Vayachel, the root letters are kaf, hay, and lamed. These combined can spell Kehillah. We talked all about coming together, and how coming together can make us kadosh, or holy.

In our own Kehillah, we sang HaTikvah (Israel's national anthem) and had snack. Mrs. Milgrom also reminded us about the fundraiser at Choolaah on Tuesday. We hope everyone will come out and support our school!

In class, we talked about LaShon HaRa (gossip). This is a continuation of our class last week. After a short review we split up into groups and acted out scenarios of when gossip happens and how we can be an upstander to stop gossip.

In Hebrew, Mr. Stone taught us about how we can use syllables to help us better decode long Hebrew words. When Mrs. Milgrom stopped by, she talked about how sometimes when Hebrew words are very long and especially if they have similar sounds repeated multiple times in the word, we can get a little lost. Practicing our decoding with syllables can help us stay on track!

Mr. Stone designed a fun matching game to help us practice decoding by syllable. Then, we focused on prefixes and suffixes, to important components to syllable work.

Grade 5

To begin the day, Grade 5 had T’filah. Rabbi is back, so he talked to us about this week’s Torah portion, Vayachel. In Vayachel, the root letters are kaf, hay, and lamed. These combined can spell Kehillah. We talked all about coming together, and how coming together can make us kadosh, or holy. Next, we had Kehillah, and we ate graham crackers and drank water. 

Back in class we signed up for our shifts for the Purim carnival. Our booth is going to be bean bag toss, and next week we’ll finish up our super cool poster. Afterwards, we talked about our Jewish Events Timeline, to review what we’ve learned and where what we are learning today goes on the timeline.

Today was all about Amos and Isaiah. We got packets to learn about these two stories, and to help give our classmates a better understanding, we made a quick class lesson to present. A few examples of what we did are news reports, skits, and commercials. Most of us derived from these stories that being positive is key to achieving social justice. 

Last we had Hebrew. During our Hebrew lesson, we continued off what we were doing last week to understand prayers of giving thanks. Then we had the chance to actually write our own prayers to thank G-d for things. Examples of what our prayers were about were freedom, health, and peace. Afterward, we got into small groups to make games to play for remembering the blessings of petition. We will play these games next week.

Grade 6

We were thrilled to have Rabbi back with us in T'filah today after his sabbatical! During services, he taught us about this week's Torah portion, Vayachel. One student asked if the Torah that we read from is the same one that Moshe had. Rabbi explained that we believe that the stories are the same, but that ours has been influenced by the many people who have copied the words and retold the stories over time.

In Kehillah, while we waited for everyone to arrive, Cantor played a game with us where he says a Hebrew word for a body part and we have to find it on our bodies. The first time we did it, we didn't know any of the words, but week by week, we're learning more! Here, we are putting our yadayim (hands) on our rosh (head). 

In class, we worked on coming up with a name for the booth that our class is running at the Purim carnival. We came up with "Fish for Coup" because everyone will be trying to win coupons that they can redeem for fish.

While some people worked on drawing and coloring the poster, others of us prepared for an art project that we'll be doing next week about identity by taking selfies of ourselves.

In Hebrew, we reviewed trope. These are symbols that represent specific sounds when chanting. Both Torah and Haftarah have a set of trope. We color coded the trope so we can remember the difference between the symbols. Mrs. Gabay led us in a repeat after me song to help us learn the sounds.