Well, goodness gracious! I almost forgot to post our post school year post! Let me crank this out real fast, because in a word, this year was a breeze!
First, school stuff we wrapped up in May. Anchored Enrichment. These pics were from the Award Ceremony. Noah was voted Biggest Dreamer ... which is absurd, but that's what happens when you let 4th and 5th graders try to assess Superlatives for each other. Noah literally mouthed to me from the stage, "I don't know what this means?" HA!
Thankfully, Anna's teacher picked the awards herself for each kid so she got something more thoughtfully descriptive of her - the RockStar Student Award. Her teacher also stopped to find me in the audience and made me raise my hand before telling this little snippet. She had the kiddos name what they want to be when they grow up - Anna explained that she wants to be a missionary in a refugee camp. You can imagine the Awwwwwwwwww sound that this elicited from the roomful of parents. I was proud of my sweetie, yes, and that is really and truly what she means. But I also know it was mostly just fresh in her mind because we had just finished reading a book about someone in a refugee camp.
Proud of BOTH my big kid babies and what great classmates they are among their peers.
The next thing Noah and Anna wrapped up in May was a year long Spanish class they attended on Wednesdays. They learned so much!! Anna enjoyed it the most.
And finally, the bulk of all our giant exhales regarding what we wrapped up in May - schoolwork! Both kiddos finished strong in Math, each in their respective levels of Right Start Mathematics. Anna completed her year in April, so we rolled right on into her third grade math to fill time to the end of the year. Noah's math level cranked up the challenge at the end of the year and he took it all in stride. Here's a shot of him multiplying fractions like a whiz. We will be sticking with Right Start Mathematics for both kids next year as well, BUT we might shift Noah on up to a computer based math curriculum called Teaching Textbooks midyear, depending on how we like the next book coming out and how we are feeling about it. It's actually still being written at the moment, which is a little unnerving. We shall see. Exciting, though, to see Noah so near to middle school level work! Both kiddos did maintenance work online throughout this year with xTra Math again. Noah tested out completely of their 2 second challenge levels a few months ago, in fact. Anna is jealous.
The rest of our subjects (History, Geography, Reading, Language Arts, Writing, Art) ended right on time in May too via this year's new curriculum, Trail Guide to Learning. We did the first year of the sequence, Paths of Exploration, and thoroughly enjoyed each and every unit, of which there were 6. We dove in deep studying all facets of history and exploration via Columbus, the Pilgrims, Jamestown, Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and the Oregon Trail. It was a great year! We will be sticking with the curriculum for next year as well, Paths of Settlement. Also, we continued with greek and latin roots and word parts with our Word Build curriculum and will finish that through morning work maintenance this summer. We will continue with this with their online option next year.
At year's end, we happened to be on a field trip to Mammoth Cave in KY. It was perfect timing! On the way home, we stopped for our annual last day doughnut tradition.
Other honorable mentionables the kids spent time working on this year included cursive, independent devotions for Bible, audiobooks, AR reading and tests, and just getting used to doing more daily tasks independently. And rolling with the toddler punches that required many breaks and interruptions in our days.
This summer, we have enjoyed having less on our Have To Do list each day, but I have given the kids silent reading each day, audio books in the car, and a smidge of morning work just for healthy routine and maintenance. Mostly, this has involved cursive practice, Adventure Science TV vids, Salsa episodes on computer, journal writing, and some vocabulary work. We have a new writing curriculum to do this upcoming school year that I think we will get a head start on in July. Thinking about waiting til mid August to start our school year for 2017-2018. That's later than I have ever done before, but I am more tired than I have even been before too. Ha!
No comments:
Post a Comment