We are going to travel back a hundred years in time to the Old West as we read Cowboys, by Lucille Penner. We'll explore what it was like to make a living as a cowboy through the reading of this narrative nonfiction selection. The paired selection Cowboy Gear from The Cowboy's Handbook describes what to wear when you're riding the range.

Your child can practice this week's vocabulary list words by playing the series of Java Games linked below in the Quia Activities section. There are four games that range in difficulty, beginning with Flashcards, then Match Game, Concentration, and finally Word Search. The words and definitions are available online by clicking the link to the List of Terms found near the top of any of the Java Games pages. Once your child has mastered matching the list words and definitions, he should click the link for the Cloze Activity which tests list vocabulary in sentence context.

The Useful Links section contains enrichment activities and information that correlate to this week's stories and skills, and are for your use at home. This week's spelling focus will be words with suffix endings -ness and -less, and you'll find a link to practice below. Our grammar skill is using commas in compound sentences.