January 28: New Year, New Learning

Humanities: 

To start the new semester, we have moved from Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt. The students created a map of Ancient Egypt, explored the importance of the Nile, and are now making authentic recreations of boats invented by the Egyptians. We also explored a modern day issue on the Nile; the building of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. The dam has the potential to provide electricity to 70 millions Ethiopians but could also restrict the flow of water to Sudan and Egypt who rely on the Nile for 90% of their drinking water. Ask your student to explain the conflict and whose side they are on. 

Speaking of conflict… we are also beginning our argumentative writing unit. So far, we have learned to make a claim and support the claim with evidence. The students also examined marketing images to look for unsubstantiated evidence and read text sets of debates to recognize the characteristics of a good argument.

Math:

The 5th grade just finished a really fun and engaging project. They “opened” a restaurant, dined at each other’s restaurants, and calculated a variety of situations using decimal multiplication. We are now moving forward with dividing decimals. This will be the last operation with decimals before moving on to fractions. The project for this unit will incorporate all the operations with decimals that we have learned while the students show off their skills in planning their next “vacation”! I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Hebrew Heritage:

להורים שלום,

אנחנו עובדים על יחידה חדשה ״אנחנו ומוזיקה״, ביחידה ננסה להבין מה משמעות של מוזיקה עבורנו, האם היא כלי שמרגיע, משמח, מעציב אותנו? מה התפקיד שלה בחיי היום יום? מה אני מעדיף לשמוע כשאני הולך לישון או מכין שיעורי בי

ת? התלמידים לומדים באמצעות האזנה למוזיקה, כתיבת דיאלוג, קריאת טקסטים ולימוד מילים חדשות המתאימות ליחידה.

סוף שבוע נעים ורגוע,

אילנה

Hebrew

 We have been continuing  to learn about famous Jewish people. We finished unit about politicians. Students learned about David Ben Gurion who was the first Prime minister of Israel and declared the establishment of Israel State in 1948. Learning about David Ben Gurion, students learned about his life and new facts about Israel. To encourage students to learn new vocabulary and use it  students wrote about American politicians and presented it to their classmates. Our next topic is artists and musicians. We started it from learning about a famous Israeli’s poet Rachel Hameshoreret . We read, talked, wrote and discussed her life story and listened to her poems.  Also we have been practicing conjugating verbs belonging to the 5 main groups of the verb in the past tense, and use several common verbs from each of the groups in speech and writing.

שבת שלום! Yuliya