So the end of the year came & went, and I hope you all had an amazing break celebrating the birth of our Savior!

Now, it's time to turn our focus back to school. The beginning of this next semester began well with a cancellation on what should have been the first day back, a 2 hour delay on the second day, and another cancellation for Friday of the first week. However, the students are doing an amazing job of diving into their studies.

Foreign Language always begins with a higher expectation than at the end. Because of how everything works, the students are required to do 6 lessons per day for the first little while. Eventually, they go back to 5 lessons per day. Most of the students seem to be dealing with this better than they have in the past grading periods. Well done, and keep it up!

In math, we are studying a wide variety of topics due to the difference in age, ability, and maturity of the students. Here's a quick run down:

Calculus - We are continuing to look at integrating functions and are using a method called integration by guessing. It will help for future problems of this sort by providing a common sense approach to integration.

Pre-Calulus - Vectors and their properties are the topic of their first chapter. So far, we've drawn 2-dimensional vectors, found their horizontal & vertical components, worked with the magnitude of vectors, added them, and have extended our study to 3-dimensional vectors.

Algebra 2 - The use of calculators in problems involving exponents was the aim of one lesson. Using calculators properly in more complicated problems is important and can be difficult because of the complexity of scientific or graphing calculators. Additionally, we may know what we want a calculator to do, but may type things in causing it to do operations in the wrong order. This is problematic. Knowing these pit falls are useful for all of us.

Algebra 1 - Operations involving common bases with varying exponents were studied right after break. Again, the students did a fantastic job of working through their problems and doing what they were supposed to.

Middle School Math - Fractions, ratios, and rates were the basis of their new material when they came back to school. The 2 hour delay seemed to throw them off a little bit, but they did an amazing job of picking up the pace to catch up.

Publications - We are beginning the 3rd portion of our writing book, preparing for the first newsletter, and taking care of announcements. There are a couple of other tasks that will be tossed their way, but this is basically where we began.

All in all, the students have impressed me with their efforts coming back. I want to thank them, encourage them to keep it up, and encourage you to give them a pat on the back for this. Keep us in your prayers as the year continues. Thanks.