Happy Monday, friends. It was a rainy, wet, and dreary weekend in my neighborhood, but I'm not really complaining. We may have had a short work-week, but it felt longer than a five-day work week! Mostly because we had testing all week for math, reading, and language, so the kids were beyond restless by the time we got to Friday. Let's just say it made for a long week, and I was not turning down the opportunity for a lazy weekend.

In other news, we're almost finished reading our novel, and by some miracle of fate we've stayed on track with it in every class. So we'll have a final assessment in a couple of weeks, then we'll get to watch the movie adaptation and do a comparison activity with that, and finally they'll do a creative project on one of the characters.

We'll be starting narrative writing this week, which I'm kind of excited about. I've got what I think is a fun prompt for the kids, but I really never know what they're going to respond to, so we'll see.

Fall Break is in a few weeks, then we'll swap gears for the second nine weeks. I'm not teaching a novel unit for this one, but we will be dipping our toes into drama with The Monsters are Due on Maple Street and A Christmas Carol. We'll also read The Smallest Dragonboy. There are some other smaller things we'll do in conjunction with each of those selections, as well. We'll also move into expository (explanatory) writing, and I have what I hope will be a fun project for them.

The only other thing of note from last week is that we filmed the first episode of the student morning show. It felt a little weird to write scripts after four years, especially since our stories aren't exactly 'news,' but that's actually a nice change of pace. Less stress, if you know what I mean.

Well, that's pretty much it for me. I hope you all have a wonderful week!