Any Excuse to Dress Up

Tonight was the night that all of the kids in our homeschool group celebrated being promoted to the next grade. We all look forward to this event each year. We get to dress up nice and celebrate another year past. We get to fellowship with our friends and the kids get to walk around with their yearbooks and swap signatures.

This year we had 5 seniors, two sets of twins. They all took turns receiving their diplomas from their parents, delivering a brief speech, and then we all watched a slide show of their lives. Every time I see a child graduate from homeschool, I get all choked up. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication from a homeschool family to get a student through all the years of lessons, curriculum changes, good days, and bad days. Seeing these kids graduate gives me hope and renews my heart for the coming school year.

After the seniors, we start going down the line from Pre-k all the way to 12th grade. The kids are called one at a time to come take their certificate and stand on the stage with their classmates by grade level. It is so sweet seeing all the moms and dads taking turns snapping pictures of their little ones as they cross the stage.

We still have 2 weeks left until we finish our curriculum but I can say that they have earned their certificates.

• At the beginning of the year Twizzler was still a struggling reader. He was still working on sounding out each and every word. Now he is reading whole chapters out loud to me from his book each day. 
• Skittles went from counting all of his math problems out on his fingers to flying through long division in no time. 
• Twizzler started out this year with very little spelling experience. I guess because he struggled so much with reading, I expected him to struggle with spelling but I think that studying his spelling words in word families, truly helped him with his reading. 
• Skittles learned how to write cursive. I am always impressed when he hands in a completed assignment that has been written in cursive. 
• We studied the history of our country from as far back as we have written history. We even got to witness some of it first hand at the civil war reenactment. 
• We learned all about the seashore, the forest, many animals, and the seasons. We also learned how to form a hypothesis, test a theory, and form a conclusion based on our collected data. 
• We learned about how and why we write the way that we do in English. It may be a bit grueling but the kids are learning a lot. 

I can't wait until next year... We have to get through the next two, COUNT 'EM, TWO weeks.