Friday, June 4, 2010

We made it! Year One, Complete!

It is hard to believe, but we have completed our first official year of homeschooling. Since my last update, we spent a week in Southern California, where the kids had fun golfing, enjoying the beach, and visiting Disneyland for the first time...







Then we had to come back and try to make it through two more weeks of school, no easy feat after time with fun in the sun! I do NOT recommend taking a trip so close to the end of the school year, but in this case it couldn't be helped. We came back to a week of extreme busyness, between school and daily rehearsals for Ron leading up to his annual violin school concert at Orchestra Hall...


We did manage to finish school, but I honestly can't remember all we did! Basically, we just pushed through every subject as far as we could go. In terms of photo-worthy efforts, we did some science experiments with air, seeing its effect on falling objects such as crumpled balls of paper versus flat sheets of paper, as well as making homemade parachutes which we attached to some of the boys' Star Wars lego figures...




We also saw our first hummingbird at our feeder, and have been spotting one every day since! Seeing such a special, remarkable bird has been a wonderful way to end our year of learning with all the different visitors to our multiple backyard feeders that we have up in our yard. (We've come a long way since our battles with the squirrels last summer and fall!)



Then, to further complicate things, our annual homeschool state convention landed right at the end of our last week, which meant that I would miss much of the last day of school and also our "evaluation day" which I had planned for the last Friday. So, DH held the fort these past two days and I wrote up an exam of sorts, mainly for Harry and a much shorter version for Ron, for DH to administer while I was at the convention. Both boys passed with flying colors, and I was extremely pleased with all they'd done and accomplished this year! In the next post, I'll go into more detail about what these tests entailed and what the kids have learned. But for now, I think it suffices to say that we have successfully finished our first year of homeschooling, which is definitely cause for celebration and for ice cream!!!