At the Jewish Lyceum No. 144 named after Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, a leading educational institution of the Jewish Community of Dnipro, the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language united two events: students of grades 5–8 took part in the game “Language Mafia,” while the high school students and teachers wrote the Radio Dictation of National Unity.
For the middle school students, the celebration of the Ukrainian language turned into a detective investigation. According to the game’s plot, they were to save Slovohrad from language villains: find mistakes, restore stress accents, return the stolen letters, and untangle phraseological expressions. The children put forward versions, sought clues, and tried to figure out whom they could trust. Slovohrad was saved, and the tasks helped the students test their knowledge in an exciting game.
The high school students and educators joined the Radio Dictation of National Unity, which this year, based on the text by the writer Artur Dron, “The Letter That Does Not End,” was read by the teacher Artur Proidakov and the well-known singer, public figure, and volunteer Dasha Astafieva. The participants noted that the text sounded slowly, clearly, and expressively: one could take one’s time, ponder every word, and listen attentively. After the dictation concluded, there remained a feeling of joy from having done something important together with the entire country.
Different in form, these events were connected by a shared educational idea. The game enabled the children to feel the excitement of linguistic discovery, while the radio dictation reminded them that attentiveness to the word unites people. Thus the Ukrainian language became for the lyceum students not merely a school subject but also part of their personal experience and participation in the life of the country.
“It is important to us that children study the Ukrainian language with interest, are able to hear its beauty, and feel their involvement in the shared culture of the country,” noted the director of the Jewish Lyceum, Olena Krasnova. “Such events help us raise students who treat the native Ukrainian language with respect, value their Jewish identity, and grow into responsible members of the united and cohesive Jewish Community of Dnipro under the leadership of Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki.”
