1st blog of the school year!

In Social Studies, students each took an aspect of the American Revolution. They created slideshows to teach the class about the Declaration of Independence, battles of the war, and other details before the Treaty of Paris.

In Language Arts, we focused specifically on sentence fragments. After each grammar lesson, students are responsible for that concept in their writing.That means I shouldn’t see any more sentence fragments! Students have finished their first essays and are using presentations to persuade their classmates to read their books! A part of their grade depends on whether or not they can persuade at least one person to read their book. Someone already convinced me to read their book while I edited their presentation!

In Civics, we rounded out the framework of the Constitution, covering Article III (Judicial) after learning about the first two articles (legislative and executive) previously. Now we are studying how the branches ‘check and balance’ one another. Ask your kids: how many justices on the Supreme Court? And why can just one word make a difference in what a law means?

In Judaics, we had a test on the word Tanach, which everyone did very well on. We learned why we needed a Mishnah and started studying one. We tried to understand that even though Jewish law is in the Mishnah, it’s not the final word on Jewish law. We translated the Mishnah, having worked on it in groups, and then analyzed it. We then learned a new color-coding system that Tani created to help us understand the role of each part of a mishnah.