You’ve already seen Ladybug’s graduation photos, but I waited until today for the final wrap-up of the 2024-25 school year because I had one more very special outing planned for Ladybug:
The rest of the week was just finishing everything up…Ladybug was ecstatic to be done with Jane Eyre and her term paper, plus she finished American Nations and our mad dash through poetry. Chickadee also finished her final paper and history project, plus wrapped up pre-algebra, and now I never have to teach it again!
We also did a few of our favorite things one last time…took a really long walk, visited the library, and played tennis.
And our favorite last-day-of-school activity…building some new Lego sets! We went with a floral theme this time…they’ll make excellent decorations for our school room (or any other place in the house that needs a bit of brightening), and there’s a fourth piece in the set that Chickadee will build on the first day of her eighth grade year!
That’s a wrap on my 17th year of homeschooling…up next, my first year ever with only one student in my school!
We finished the final chapter of the 2023-24 school year!
Ladybug wrapped up a few final things this week. She read about magnetism in physics. In history, she read about Joan of Arc, Henry VII, and the fall of Constantinople. She read some literary selections from the Restoration and Neoclassical Age, including Phillis Wheatley’s “To S.M., A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Work.”
Chickadee finished her math curriculum by learning how to calculate simple interest with i=prt. She completed her final writing assignment about African and Asian elephants and their habitats. She also completed her grammar review for the year. We read about Paul’s missionary journeys and trip to Rome.
We had one final field trip for the 2023-24 school year…we attended the final History Exploration Day for the year at the Missouri History Museum, which focused on recreation, which is both a fun and serious topic, as we looked not only at how people enjoyed recreation in the past, but also who wasn’t welcome at various locations.
And one last fun activity before the end:
On to the summer…there’s a lot we’re looking forward to, including the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games!
The last two years just flew by, and today, Turkey and Bunny received their Associate’s degrees…Turkey an Associate in Science, and Bunny an Associate in Arts!
I enjoyed getting a look at the class banner while we were there:
It was a very nice ceremony…in addition to being on the Dean’s List all four semesters (they received a special blue tassel for that) and members of Phi Theta Kappa (the gold tassel, cord, and stole), not to mention Turkey’s Outstanding Math Student award for the 2022-23 school year, they were recognized for having a perfect 4.0 GPA, something less than 10% of the graduates accomplished. They have kept pace with each other from the very beginning!
We are all so proud!
Two weeks from today, I’ll be celebrating with the two of the them at Disneyland!
That’s it for the 2022-23 school year! This was a pretty light week, focused on wrapping things up. Ladybug and Chickadee took their final tests and finished what they needed to in various books. We also had one last field trip…a visit to Grant’s Farm for Maifest. I thought this was a great way to end the year, especially since our Christmas School was focused on learning about Christmas in Germany, and Chickadee has so diligently studied German with Duolingo this year.
We ended the year the way we began…with a Disney-themed Lego set. This one is an art set of Minnie Mouse that is a companion to the piece we built back in August, and they actually connect to make one large picture!
In some ways, I don’t feel like I put in as much effort as I should have this my 15th year of homeschooling. It was a complicated year, schedule-wise, and I felt stretched pretty thin. I’m already looking forward to all of the things we’ll be doing next year, though, and hopefully I’ll make up for the lack of energy I had this year!
And just like that, the 2021-22 school year has come to an end! The week was mostly spending time outdoors (our daily walk is now at about four miles, even in the unpleasant heat we’ve been having!) and wrapping things up.
Ladybug took her final geometry exam (and got an “A”!). She finished the chapter on mammals in biology by reading about learned and innate behaviors, and various forms of conditioning. She also finished her astronomy course by learning about celestial navigation…she even used Google Earth to find the approximate coordinates of our house! We finished her study of religious writings by reading about the Book of Mormon. She read about Constantine in history. To conclude our study of Henry V, we watched The Hollow Crown, episode four.
Chickadee also finished up math by reviewing equations, fractions, and how to cross multiply and divide. We read about sponges in science (we do still have one field trip left related to her study of aquatic animals…stay tuned!). She reviewed all of the parts of speech she’s learned by diagramming some fairly long sentences. We wrapped up our study of US geography by learning about Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington D.C.
As always, we built a Lego set to celebrate the last day of school (and since Turkey and Bunny were home at an unusual time due to their finals schedule, they were able to lend a hand):
This was a different year for all of us, and it took some getting used to. I’m really glad we did some very different things this year instead of trying to force things to be “normal” (reading Little Women, especially outside under our tree when the weather was nice, and cooking together were my favorite moments of the school year), and even though things felt strange a lot of the time, as always, I’m sad to see the school year end!
Hymn of the Week–“Go, My Children, with My Blessing” (Lutheran Service Book #922)
This is the final wrap-up for the 2020-21 school year!
On Sunday, we visited the Missouri Botanical Garden…not really a field trip, but we’ve gone so few places in the last 15 months, I thought it deserved a mention.
As for the school week, we just worked on finishing everything up. Turkey, Bunny, and Ladybug submitted their final final papers…I was very impressed with the wide range of topics they chose (Turkey looked at the character of Frank Burns from M*A*S*H and why he’s no longer a caricature and thus no longer funny, Bunny wrote about whether Benedict Arnold was a hero or villain, and Ladybug discussed major events of WWII). Moose finished up his year of distance learning…it certainly wasn’t an easy way to experience his first year of high school, but he did a great job! Turkey, Bunny Ladybug, and Chickadee all finished their final science chapters. Ladybug and Chickadee were also excited to take a look at the crystals they’ve been growing:
And then the day I’ve been dreading all year…Turkey’s and Bunny’s graduation day. I’m so proud of them, but I can’t believe I’m losing half of my students at once!
As always, we ended the year with a Lego set…this time, the Medieval Blacksmith. It’s a really cool set…I especially love the color scheme!
One last time…my students:
This year has been, at times, impossibly difficult, and I wasn’t always sure how we’d make it through. Now that it’s over, though, I find that I’m sad to see it go. It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime situation, with all five children learning at home all year. While I hope never to live through a pandemic again, we definitely made a lot of memories, and there are things I will definitely miss.
To end the school year, I will leave you with some wise thoughts from Wade:
I don’t always have photos taken of me with my students on the first or last day of school in any given year, but as it turns out, I did have a photo of Turkey, Bunny, and I from our very first day of homeschooling way back in September 2008, and I made sure to take another today to commemorate Turkey’s and Bunny’s high school graduation.
I guess the experiment we decided to try for one year turned out ok!
Today is Moose’s last day of junior high (his virtual graduation is yet to come, on Thursday). Let’s take a look back at every first day of school from kindergarten through 8th grade!
And his last days of school in kindergarten and 8th, kind of. The kindergarten graduation picture was easy, but his “last day” of 8th grade took a little more thought. I didn’t get a picture of his actual last day of classes at the physical school, because at the time, who could have known that would be the last day? So I decided on the day about two weeks ago when we dropped off a few things, and picked up his 8th grade stuff, including a nice sign they had made for our yard.
It was a fairly low-key week, with no field trips (obviously), and several subjects already wrapped up. We continued taking our daily pre-lunch two mile walk around our neighborhood, and while I miss playing tennis, I have to say that time of walking and talking together has probably been my favorite thing to come out of our modified schedule, and I’ll be sad when it gets hot and we won’t want to do it anymore.
Turkey and Bunny read about the fall of Constantinople in world history, and we finished US history, with most of our attention on FDR and WWII, and a brief race through the decades following. They worked with limits of a function in pre-calculus. They also finished reviewing various comma rules in grammar, and read an ode by Phyllis Wheatley.
Ladybug wrote a 1,200 word paper on one of her favorite books to finish her writing curriculum for the year. Her final chapter in history focused on the California Gold Rush. She finished science by learning about the five senses. She also read about Paul’s final missionary journey in religion.
Chickadee finished reading The Sword in the Tree. We also finished My Father’s Dragon. She wrapped up her study of astronomy. Her math lessons were mostly review, although some more complicated borrowing when subtracting was a fun surprise for her.
Today we built a Lego set, as we always do on the last day of school. It was nice that Moose was able to be with us for our last day, even though he won’t be done (and graduated from eighth grade!), until the middle of next week. This time it was the Lego Ideas ISS, which goes well with all of our other Lego space sets!
This is the most anti-climatic last day of school I can remember, and I have to admit, it was kind of a sad day for me. I had so many things that I wanted to do in the last few months…visiting the Van Gogh exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum, touring the Mississippi River exhibit at the Missouri History Museum, spending many lovely hours walking around the Missouri Botanical Garden and sketching the spring blooms, enjoying tulip time in Forest Park, and visiting the St. Louis Zoo were all on my list. Obviously, none of that could happen, and we also haven’t been able to look forward to our annual trip to Chicago that we were supposed to take next week. I’m also trying not to think ahead to the future too much, because it scares me a little when I think of what the beginning of our next school year, Turkey and Bunny’s last year of homeschooling, could look like. I’m trying really hard to focus on the positive, so I’ll leave you with some pictures from Wednesday, when we got to play with dry ice, something we probably wouldn’t have gotten to do if it wasn’t for this weird time of isolation:
