Middle School News

April is National Poetry Month and Ramaz eighth graders celebrated with a tribute to the Bard himself! The students performed scenes from one of Shakespeare’s classic comedies, “Twelfth Night.” In this unit in English class, the students brought the iconic and beautiful language to life through...

The Middle School has established a brand-new voluntary early morning learning group! Three times a week, students meet before Shacharit to learn Torah. Founded by Rabbi Chaim Hagler, the group began by discussing topics of Pesach. For example, they have been examining the Haggadah and...

As enrichment to their history curriculum, a small group of eighth graders, along with Ms. Tzipora Ross, had the privilege of visiting Ms. Bronia Brandman in her Brooklyn home and hearing the harrowing story of how she survived Auschwitz. After describing her childhood in Poland among her six siblings, eleven aunts and uncles, and multiple cousins, Ms. Brandman went on to explain how she...

As Pesach approaches, Rabbi Gilad Gaon's eighth-grade students have been exploring the halachic measurements of matzah and maror required for the seder. Using classic sources and opinions from leading poskim, they analyzed how much matzah and maror are needed for...

8th graders were privileged to hear from Ramaz alumni parent and grandparent, and current great-grandparent, Ms. Gabriella Major, about her experience surviving the Holocaust as a young child in Hungary. She began her talk by reading her original poem, "We Shall Overcome," which she wrote in recent years and dedicated to her 28 extended family members who were murdered in the Holocaust. She then told her story. Ms. Major was only 15 months old when she was taken from her home to two different ghettos, before boarding a cattle car to...

After weeks receiving visits from the Jewish Museum and learning about historical art techniques, sixth graders culminated their unit with a trip to the museum themselves. Over the course of weeks, each student has created an illuminated manuscript page, displaying their first initial and adding embellishments about their identity, including their favorite Jewish holidays, sports teams, and...

Eighth graders received a visit to complement their curriculum on the history of jazz music. They have been studying this unit for three months, and now, a real jazz band came to perform a private concert for them in the auditorium! These four musicians are graduate students from the jazz program in NYU. Playing saxophone, upright bass, drums, and piano, they...

Seventh-grade science students are learning about DNA. To better understand its structure, they conducted a hands-on lab using gummy bears and Twizzlers to create a model of DNA and nucleotides. The Twizzlers represented the sugar phosphate backbone of the double helix, while the gummy bears represented...