SHABBAT SHALOM. Saturday, September 24, Elul 5776 CALENDAR OF EVENTS. A Message from the Principal Mrs. Miriam Gettinger

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1 Hasten Hebrew Academy of Indianapolis 6602 Hoover Road Indianapolis, IN Friday, September 23, 2016 Vol. 13 #7 SHABBAT SHALOM 20 Elul 5776 Friday, September 23, 2016 Saturday, September 24, 2016 Candle Lighting 7:19 p.m. Shabbat Ends after 8:38 p.m. A Message from the Principal Mrs. Miriam Gettinger While the deadline for ten digit calling has been extended from this past week to October 15 th, get ready to adjust and deal with the inconvenience of reprogramming all of your cell phone contacts to accommodate the new mandate of dialing the 317 prefix ahead of all local calls. Central Indiana receives a new area code designation of 463 in November for new customers and the ten digit overlay, standard operating practice for years in densely populated areas, allows for old customers to retain their original phone numbers. For the statistically curious, each area code can have 7.92 million number combinations, and the 317 code, one of the state s first since established in 1947, was primed to be exhausted by 2017 necessitating the change. The term cold calling while generally regarded as a business marketing strategy, actually is utilized in the educational arena as well with teachers calling upon select students to respond to homework or content area discussion even as said students have not volunteered to participate. The use of cold calling in instruction remains controversial as most teachers are nurturing empathetic role models who do not see themselves as authority figures in front of whom students cower and to the contrary, classroom climates are designed for students to feel safe engaging in the learning activities. Ironically however, research suggests that counterintuitively, cold calling encourages students to prepare more and to participate more frequently thus becoming more comfortable when they do participate. The very reason teachers hesitate to call upon students who are not raising their hands as they appear uncomfortable to participate is in essence actually a disservice to the student and to the class; random spontaneous calling becomes a warm invitation to contribute to the discussion and further engage the learning of both the reluctant participant and that of their peers. When teachers query their students and only call upon those with raised hands they are preaching to the choir so to speak for knowledge level questions as those who are raising their hands more often than not already know the answer. Significantly, teachers at HHAI and in higher education ask far more thinking or conceptual questions to which this there no single right or wrong answer and which mandates wait time allowing for all students and not only the quick thinkers to participate in the challenge. Obviously, this cold calling strategy requires questions to be shared in advance for the extremely introverted or socially anxious students and begins by asking nonjudgmental low stakes questions such as your favorite holiday or food to ensure that all students feel comfortable in the process. Use of random calling through name sticks or individual student response whiteboards encourages all students to join in the classroom conversation and validates the value of each student s opinion and thoughts eliminating a private conversation between the teacher and one or two extroverts who would CALENDAR OF EVENTS Grades 4-8 Homework Club will meet Monday, Wednesday, Thursday next week. NO HOMEWORK CLUB ON TUESDAY Grades 1-3 Homework Club will meet Monday & Wednesday next week. The next scrip order will be placed on September 27 Orders will be here on September 30. Please call Toni at ext. 158 to place an order. PTO Meeting September 29 7:30 pm Progress Reports - Grades 1-8 September 29 Reports will be ed/Mailed Rosh Hashanah October 3 & 4 NO SCHOOL Erev Yom Kippur October 11 2:00 pm Dismissal - No Extended Day Yom Kippur October 12 NO SCHOOL otherwise dominate the classroom and indeed is one of the gifts of a smaller class affording all an opportunity to fully participate and gain confidence in their thinking and articulation of thought. (See the testimonial student alumni video on our school website for this very point!) Yet, one of the defining attributes of Jews is that we are byshanim/ inherently bashful along with rachnamin and gomlei chassadim/ merciful and charitable. Importantly, one of the beautiful features of the Kohein Gadol/high priest s vestment of the mieel tunic was the placement of decorative bells and pomegranates on the hem so that he would gently announce his presence and not startle the congregation. I imagine the priests would not have practiced cold calling although the numbers 3, 1 and 7 have special significance in Judaism!

2 Parshat Ki Tavo By Rabbi Berel Wein The warnings to the Jewish people as contained in this week s Torah readings are awesome (how I despise that word as currently used in popular vernacular!) in their ferocity and cruelty. Unfortunately, they are also unerringly truthful and accurate. Everything in its minutest detail did befall us, not only over the long millennia of our existence as a people but as an accurate description of our fate in the last century. The eternal question that nags at our very being as a people is why? or perhaps better still why us? Though the Torah implicitly and explicitly puts the onus for all of this on the obstinacy and waywardness of the sinful behavior of the Jewish people, Jews throughout the ages have found it difficult to fit this punishment to the crime. Even in Second Temple times already, the rabbis were hard pressed to determine the cause of the Temple s destruction and resorted to explaining it in terms of baseless internal feuds and hatreds. As destructive as these traits undoubtedly are, they are difficult to pin down and identify as part of a national polity of a society of millions of individuals. We are therefore left to deal with the issues purely as a matter of faith and acceptance. God s judgment and policies are correct, exquisitely so, but completely beyond human understanding and rationalization. Though the Torah demands rational thought and analysis in interpreting its laws and value system, in essence it is obvious that it must be dealt with, in its authority and influence over human events, more as a matter of Heavenly understanding than human intelligence. We have the great example of Rabi Akiva, who saw in the destruction of the Temple and the terrible scenes of cruelty that the Romans wrought against the Jews, the seeds of rebirth and resilience of the Jewish people. It is one of the mysteries of nature that destruction is always part of rejuvenation and renewal. The raging and most destructive forest fire somehow preserves and guarantees the growth of a new, greater and more verdant forest. There is an interesting interpretation of the well-known verse in Kohelet: A generation departs and a generation arrives and the earth survives forever. Aside from the usual understanding of the verse in regard to human mortality and the unchanging state of the world and its challenges, the verse can be viewed as teaching us another lesson. Namely, that it is only because of the departure of one generation and the consequent renewal caused by the arrival of another generation that the world is able to survive and remain vital. Now this begs the question as to why God created nature and the world in such a pattern. But, at least to me, it does signify the eternal path of the Jewish people through history as being in line with nature s pattern of eternity itself. Just as nature with its very destructive forces nevertheless guarantees the eternity of the world, this parsha guarantees the survival of the Jewish people. Shabat Shalom Rabbi Berel Wein Artist of the Week By Mrs. MaryEllen Fellegy Congratulations to second graders Rachel Schwartz and Gil Nakar! Second graders have been working on a reading unit called Sharing Stories in their Language Arts class with Mrs. Nurok. Their first story was about the life of artist Claude Monet. Students learned many interesting facts about Monet, Gil Nakar including his style of painting. Just ask any second grader and he or she will tell you that Claude Monet was an Impressionist! In Art class students discussed Monet's painting titled "The Water Lily Pond". They learned that he bought exotic water lilies from faraway lands to plant in his water garden and that he also had a Japanese wooden bridge built over it. In order to create their own Lily Ponds, students first explored the wet-onwet watercolor technique combined with table salt. Next, a Japanese bridge was added using oil pastels and tempera paint was brushed over it to create the illusion of space. The tranquility of the water lilies in the pond and the surrounding landscaping was captured using oil pastel and cut paper. Gil chose to create his Water Lily Pond at twilight! Please come see Rachel s and Gil s Water Lily Ponds next to the EC Library. Bar Mitzvah Lessons - Hebrew Reading Tutor - Assistance with all Judaic subject Rabbi Schusterman is available for private and customized lessons for children, teens and adults. Call or any time Jliindiana@gmail.com Rachel Schwartz Over twenty years experience! References available upon request. 2

3 By Matt Tucker We are already a week away from our midterms! This marks the middle of our first trimester at HHAI. Starting school in early August seems too early to some, but here at HHAI we are able to have a block of solid school time before the holidays start. This helps teachers and students settle into a routine and get off to a great start! This summer there were a handful of middle school math students who worked on average of 100 minutes a week practicing their math skills on Kahn Academy. I have noticed that their dedication and hard work has helped provide a solid foundation to start the year. Impressive work Samrawit, Iszabel, and Sam! Kahn Academy is a nice free online tool to use to provide differentiated online instruction and practice in hundreds of different content areas. Paper and pencil are still the tools of choice each day in all my math classes. My teaching colleagues are able to better use the ipad to communicate text in Science, Judaics, and Humanities but there is no better way to communicate mathematics than paper and pencil. We do use use the internet to do research that provides data for our reasoning, and take advantage of many great online learning resources. Some of the resources include Desmos.com, estimation180.com, Kahoot, and 101questions.com. The annual ram visit took place on Wednesday. Students in grades Katon - 8th grade had a chance to see and pet the ram while learning about the ram and how it relates to the shofar and Rosh Hashanah. Menu Fare September Estimation180 is often a favorite for students. This site provides a photograph that asks the viewer to make an estimate. First a number that is too small and then an estimate that is too big. This is a great way to get students to attempt the problem. Then we make an actual estimate and explain our thinking. We usually do not do this activity on the ipads. I have found that if we project the problem on the whiteboard and share our estimates there is much more discussion and sharing of students reasoning. Here is where students attempt to communicate and build their own models of math to best estimate. I encourage you to try out this website, a great way to share your reasoning with your child or family member. This institution is an equal opportunity provider. 3

4 Early Childhood Kindergarten By Ellie Hersh Kindergarten can be a tough year. Children come in from Ganon, another preschool, or we have kids that have never been in a school setting before. We have worked hard all year to create not only a community, but also a family of learners. It is so nice to see everyone helping each other especially during clean up time and worried about one another. Additionally it is hard because we are still part of the Early Childhood, yet we are required to do much more academic work than the rest of Early Childhood. In order to make our learning more fun and more memorable, I try very hard to bring in their interests, which goes right along with our Reggio Emilia philosophy! From the first few days of school I could see many students with interests in bugs. We saw them outside, we saw them in the hallway and we saw them in our classroom, so I decided to bring it into our academic work too. We used the insects to learn about syllables, rhyming, sequencing a story, reading and learning differences between fiction and non-fiction books, learning about caring for our animals both big and small, and even got our hands dirty making our own clay insects! Our insect and bug unit is starting to wrap up, so this week we have been creating some really cool things and meeting some interesting people! We created insects out of clay and then painted them, focusing on making them look realistic. We spent time looking at pictures of the insect we wanted to create focusing on the shapes and colors. Then each student created a two-part story about that insect focusing on having a beginning and ending that made sequential sense. Lastly, we all had to figure out how many syllables were in the name of the insects and come up with a rhyming word to go with it. On Wednesday we had a special guest to help us learn even more Mr. Jared. Mr. Jared is an entomologist for the Department of Natural Resources. We came with lots of questions and he came with lots of bugs and insects. This allowed us to dig deeper into the difference between a question and a comment and come up with appropriate questions to ask Mr. Jared. It also helped us learn how to prepare for a guest in our classroom! We all had so much fun looking at Mr. Jared s collection and asking him so many questions. I have never seen them that attentive for that long! Our school year is off to a great start and I cannot wait to see what other interests the students have! HHAI is so proud that Ms. Hersh will speak about her summer trip to Poland with Eva Kor and survivors at Butler University on September 29 at 6:15 pm. The reception will take place in the Reilly Room, Atherton Union on the Butler University campus. 4

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