It's been a great week!

Hello Families,

As we approach the end of another full week, I'm happy to say we are back on track and making great strides.  This week's lessons included the following:

Math - We continued our long division work this week.  Each lesson took the students one step farther in the long division process.  After today, I am confident that every student is comfortable with the process.  Next Tuesday there will be a Unit Test.  Each unit test is a cumulative test that includes all information from the current unit as well as a few questions from any previous units.  I will be reviewing with the class on Monday, but I have told the students they can bring home their math textbooks to look at the review on pages 49-50 in advance.

Spelling/Vocabulary/ELA - The first word list for our spelling and vocabulary work was handed out on Monday.  We reviewed the words together in class and played some great games to study them together.  Your children were also supposed to have made index cards for use at home.  It appears they did because everyone scored really high on the crossword puzzle "test."  Next week we will focus on punctuation and apply what we learn to our writing.  We are also working on editing our stories in hopes to have them published within the next two weeks.

Social Studies - We had a great time learning more about the Crusades and the spices that were discovered as a result.  This week we even had a chance to smell several of them as we learned about how they were used and why there were so valuable.  Next week, we will study the many inventions that made navigation possible.  We already know the Astrolabe because we made one together for Science.

Science - This week we spent some time talking about how the angle of Earth in relation to the sun causes variations in the length of day and night and how that relates to the seasons.  We also learned why the sun and stars appear to rise and fall because of the earth's counter-clockwise rotation.  Next week we will take a closer look at the moon after having observed it for two weeks.

Have a wonderful weekend and Shabbat Shalom!

Debby