Only six weeks 'til Thanksgiving! (I think)

So... the time until Thanksgiving is counting down, very slowly. I'm sitting here compulsively avoiding my prep for tomorrow (because I really just don't feel like doing it). Really, 75% of the work I have to do just involves cleaning up my own stuff around school, and I can't do that until tomorrow morning. Of course, when I'm at school, I just compulsively delay doing that too. I really need this Thanksgiving vacation... now.

We're going to start reading a book as a class tomorrow; I've borrowed a set of books from another fourth-grade teacher. I think it will only take a week, because this is a pretty easy book. Our grade is loosely starting a "Middle Ages unit".

I have one dilemma that I'm facing. One of my students still isn't showing a lot of improvement in spelling. When I say "not a lot of improvement," really I mean that she still spells everything phonetically in English (as well as in Spanish when there is some question, e.g. with silent "h", c/z/s mix-ups, etc). The question here, then, is whether this is some sort of disability. She doesn't recognize sometimes that she's spelled some words wrong until it's pointed out, and she clearly is making an effort to distinguish spellings (on tests I see her sometimes writing out multiple possibilities as a backup). She's repeating the fourth grade already, but last year was her first and only year chiefly in English. I'm not sure what the best thing to do is in this situation--there's got to be at least a better way of having her practice spelling, but I don't know the process for obtaining the information, which means that I've got to do some research.

I got about two-thirds of a weekend, because I spent Saturday morning at school filling out some useless paperwork. So I'm going to leave this entry rather disorganized as it is. Don't tell my kids that the paragraphs are of grossly differing lengths--they'd lose their respect for me as a writer.