EDUCATION
SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to The Jewish News
W
hen the Hillel Day
School fifth-grade
teacher rang the
large, hand-held bell to call
her class to order, students
turned their attention from
the sheep grazing on the
other side of the windows and
sat up tall in stiff, wooden
desks.
The youngsters faced a
United States flag with 38
stars and a wood burning
stove near the instructor's
table. They moved a little
uneasily in their clothes for
the day, with girls wearing
long skirts, shawls and bon-
nets and boys wearing vests,
jeans held up by suspenders
and straw hats.
On May 7, the children
were stepping back in time to
experience what rural
students encountered atten-
ding classes in the 1800s.
There were sessions in both
one-room schoolhouses at
Greenfield Village.
"This has become a tradi-
tion at Hillel," explained
Shoshana Goldschlag, the
teacher who coordinated the
program with colleagues
Shirley Cohen, Barbara
Greenbaum and Margery
Jablin. "I can't remember a
year in which we did not take
this field trip. When
youngsters return to Hillel
years down the road, they say
this has been the trip that
has made the strongest im-
pression on them."
About 70 students accom-
panied by nine parents divid-
ed their time between the
Miller School, a replica of the
one attended by Henry Ford,
and the McGuffey School, a
Sharone Senk and Alexis Pone write assignments with quill pens.
Photos by Glenn Triest
Hillel Fifth-Graders Step
A Long Way Back In Time
Hillel Day School students enter the one-room school, stepping back
in time for a day.
duplicate of an earlier, log
structure, where the flag had
15 stars, students sat on back-
less benches and the heat
came from a fireplace.
"It's not seeing; it's doing,"
said Ms. Goldschlag, who ex-
plained that lessons were
planned in terms of 19th cen-
tury living and with regard to
materials available to pupils
at that time.
While they were at the
Miller School, the fifth-
graders used small, slate
boards to complete their math
assignments, computing the
difference in ages of the
schools and the collective
costs of writing books popular
in that era.
They used feather pens for
their penmanship — not
handwriting — exercise,
carefully forming the letters
in the names of Michigan's
only cities existing between
1840 and 1870 — Lansing,
Detroit, Kalamazoo and
Grand Rapids.
At the McGuffey School, the
youngsters worked with texts
of the time, McGuffey Readers,
to recite poems such as "The
Village Blacksmith" by
Henry Wadsworth Longfel-
low; afterwards, they com-
pared the language and
typography of the discon-
tinued books to what they
find in their own books. They
also recited tongue twisters