Back to business (I hope)

I’m going to claim that the reason I didn’t blog much in the past year was because I was homeschooling Aaron.  I’m not sure if that is exactly why, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. 

It looks like back in October I finished blogging about the summer and then in November I jumped into some of the things I was thankful for, but other than that I’ve been totally MIA for this past year.  I’m sure most of you don’t really care about everything we did, but these pictures are how I keep caught up with my journaling and saving pictures for our yearly calendar. 

Here are the things I want to blog about in the next few weeks:

• Paul’s Birthday
• field trip to toyota plant
• halloween
• david’s tubes in his ears
• christian’s birthday
• 10 yr anniversary
• zoo
• trip to utah for christmas
• marcia in town
• pauls trips to washington and utah
• camping over spring break
• aaron’s birthday party
• easter
• running 5k
• my birthday
• 7 acre wood
• memorial day
• summary of each kid
• summer vacation

I’m certainly not promising to post about each of these, we’ll see how I do.  And since no one wants to read a blog without any pictures, here’s a recent one of my cute kiddos!

  

Last Day of School

School is out and Summer Break has officially started.

Here are the first day and last day of school pictures for a comparison of how my kids have grown over the past 9 months.

Before 3rd grade and 1st grade

After 3rd grade and 1st grade.  (They don’t look that different to me!)

Brian had a great 1st grade teacher in Mrs. Kelly. 

I’m not sure how much she tamed his craziness versus how much he matured, but he did great in school and by the end of the year wasn’t getting any disciplinary marks at all.  At his awards presentation he was the only student in his class to get the “Gold Academics Award” for getting straight A’s all year long. 

He also got an award for having an “Awesome Attitude” and was obviously the biggest class clown during the awards presentation.  Mrs. Kelly is moving on to 2nd grade so he might get her again this next year too.

Aaron’s teacher was me all year and we had a great year.  We finished the 3rd grade grammar book which had him diagramming sentences and memorizing poems and I think it was a great program.  We went through several spelling book (he knows how to spell amazingly well) and almost 2 full history books.  We started a writing program mid year and will continue to work on it and the history during the summer.  He also memorized scriptures, did typing lessons and learned to write in cursive.  He took swimming lessons and piano lessons and read innumerable books.  Science was also a lot of fun and we did lots of experiments. 

 

Math, of course, was where he excelled.  We have a few more weeks to finish this summer, but then he will have finished 3rd, 4th and 5th grade math books.  We are actively working with the local elementary school to determine what teacher to put him with next year and how we can work on allowing him to continue to excel in math at his own pace in class.  We are sending him back to Stephens Elementary in the Fall but I am so glad I got to homeschool him this year.  I loved it and hope to be able to do it again with my other children. 

Now on to summer!