It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

It is a beautiful 75-80 degree day here on November 20th. Today we had a half day of school (YEAH!) and are officially on Thanksgiving break. It's really hard to be in the holiday mood with such warm weather, but having the nice weather is great! My kids spent this week doing Thanksgiving crafts and such, a major difference from the elementary level to high school. I don't recall every making fan-tail turkeys, and Indian beads, and turkey place cards with high schoolers...you have to know a lot more crafts when you teach the younger ones. The transitions have been working OK with my students , but the 4th graders miss being with the 5th graders, and 3rd grade children are just crazy! But we'll get them in line shortly.

When we get back from break we'll be plowing into lots of work before Christmas break which starts on the 19th of December (1 month, not that I am counting.) When I was in school it seemed like we had SOOOO long until June, but on the other side as a teacher, it's crazy how much you have to teach in only 10 months. Testing is a whole different ballpark. My kids did some reading test s this week and scored very low, so we'll be doing lots of reading and writing practice. There is a lot of pressure when it comes to testing since I teach reading and writing (testing subjects) to 3 grade levels. We are actually using two online programs which seem very beneficial, at least one of them.

Mason is on early goes this week, which means his duty day is from 5am-5pm. Yesterday they were fogged out, and couldn't fly, but today should have been okay. I stopped by after school to bring the boys a cake, but they were taking a test so I left it with one of their IPs. They looked pretty funny all taking their test. It was like 12 peas in a pod.

It looks like we'll be having Thanksgiving, just the two of us, but if the weather's nice we'll probably take a drive to the Wichita Mountains, or check out some paths by the waterfalls. It will just be nice to have the break. Mason gets done tomorrow at noon. He's been heading to bed around 8pm lately, so I'm sure the normal sleeping hours will be good for him.

I'm looking forward to the rest of my relaxing day, I think I'll be hitting the gym and maybe giving the lawn it's last mow of the season...no rain in the near future.