In Social Studies, students organized their notebooks to reflect our study of the Constitutional Amendments. We continued through them so that they inform our discussions of current events. We will also revisit these when we debate Supreme Court cases and work our way through history this year.

In Science, students finished their skeletal system unit and celebrated by showing off their skeleton creations. Next up: muscles and skin!

In Language Arts, our week centered on sci-fi short stories. The most recent one is called “Examination Day,” and there was a general feeling in the class that the story’s ending was awful. We have begun to write different endings. We are also working on how to avoid comma splices. Check to see if your student can name the three ways to do that. (Using a period, using a word to combine two shorter sentences, or using a semicolon). This came up because this was the mistake I found most often in their expository writing.

Overlapping with Social Studies for the second straight week, Civics class was spent debating the reasons behind many of the Constitutional Amendments that developed over the centuries. We spent extra time on the 14th Amendment, as well as the 19th, among others. Of note, the 7-8 class also lowered the outdoor flags to half-staff this week and discussed the meaning behind national symbols and international friendship.

In Judaics, we finished our second mishnah, about a few of the rules of building a sukkah. We will do our color-coding next week!

This week in Music, we finished up learning about Irish music history. We learned about special Irish dances and had fun attempting a dance together. We also learned about common and uncommon time signatures ranging from 4/4 to 6/8 to 15/4. Our Mimi Award Winners were Max & Hadassah!