Good morning! I wish I weren't up so early, but I just couldn't go back to sleep. My internal alarm is set and I just woke up at the usual time. Hopefully I will be able to sleep in a little longer tomorrow and Monday; I know that's what many of the kids were looking forward to this weekend.

I had all the kids over for a lovely dinner last night, along with a dear friend. Rusty did leave pretty early to get to a football game, but the rest of us hung out and enjoyed some good conversation and lots of laughter. Oh my goodness! I took a little spill in the kitchen while making dessert! I was wearing my flip-flops (my favorite shoes) and there was water on the floor and I went down pretty hard, hitting the corner of the countertop on my way down. I am already developing quite a bruise on my arm. Ooh, that means I'd better avoid my sisters this week. One of our favorite things to do is to push on each other's bruises while saying, "Does that hurt?" Endearing, huh? So if you see me this week, please don't do that. 😳

This morning, I'm meeting with several of my girlfriends for our book club discussion about C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces. This is our first meeting, but we've only read a third of the book. We decided we'd better break it into pieces.  I've only read the Narnia series by Lewis, so I'm happy to finally be reading something else by this incredible author. After that, I'm going to have to take my computer to the Mac store to see what can be done about it. It's telling me that my disc is almost full, but I feel like I've got almost everything saved to the Cloud. Clearly, I'm no computer genius; all I know is that it is SOOOO SLOW!

Besides a lot of grading, I really don't have plans for the rest of the weekend. We're just going to let things unfold as they may. We might go out tonight, maybe take a little dance class and have dinner. Or we might meet up with friends and skip the dancing. I love having the extra day off, though. It allows me to get all the extra little errands done and feel better prepared for another week. Wouldn't 4-day school weeks be awesome? They could start a little earlier, stay a little later, and then we'd have 3-day weekends every week! Might not be ideal for some of your schedules, but I think it's brilliant! Oh well, hope everyone enjoys the extra day with your kiddos!

Here's a look at our short week ahead.

Language Arts
     Grammar - The kids will have a quiz on Wednesday, covering the concepts we've learned thus far: common and proper nouns, making nouns plural, and personal and demonstrative pronouns. We've been doing a lot of practice in class, so they should be prepared for this assessment. We'll do our first sentence diagramming later in the week! I love diagramming!

     Literature - We'll finish up with our story this week. Please be sure to send in Pollyanna by Friday, because we'll start reading that next Monday.

     Spalding - This is the week we've all been waiting for...our first list of words! Thankfully, it's a short week, so there will only be 20 words. Remember, the plan for homework is that the students review the words on the list, making note of the markings, then you (or some adult at home) will dictate the 10 words to them and check. If they make a mistake on spelling or marking, please dictate those missed words two more times. The test will be on Friday.

     Poetry - Recitations for "The Moon" will be on Friday.

Math - The kids learned about factors and multiples this week and had some challenging problems yesterday that were really algebraic equations, but they were learning how to solve them through factoring. We'll learn order of operations this week which is critical to solving longer expressions. That will wrap up the unit and we'll test them a week from Monday.

Science - We did some cool things this week in science. Maybe your kids could show you what they learned about density with the egg demonstration at home. We'll learn about properties of matter this week as well as chemical and physical change.

History - We're wrapping up our mountains unit. On Friday there will be a comprehension check. Since this unit is a geography unit, it will require that the students prepare for it. They will need to know where the largest mountain ranges are, be able to label the continents on a map, and know the parts of a map that we learned about in our first unit. A practice sheet was sent home, and the students were told to put it into their protective sleeve so they could use a dry erase marker to practice with. I know it's an R&R weekend, so that's why the test isn't until Friday. But, if you find them board at all, they could practice filling that out.

I think that's it. I'm barely going to finish this in time to get to my book club. I don't even have time to proofread this, if I want to send it this morning. So, please forgive any typos. Have a fabulous weekend!

P.S. I forgot to say thank you for all the books coming in from our wish lists! We are so appreciative and know the kids will love having them available in their own classrooms.