Ending the school year at HOME

 When the pandemic hit Texas and we moved into lock down, we were 6 weeks away from finishing the school year. It was really painful to have the school year with CC ripped away. When the whole world moved to homeschooling, I wanted to tell everyone that what we were all experiencing was not normal homeschooling! Being home ALL the time is not what we do at all, and we really missed finishing the school year with our community.

It was very sweet to see how everyone shifted gears, adjusted expectations, mourned losses, and looked for joy in new circumstances. Challenge A shifted to 4-hour zoom classes on Mondays. This broke my heart as I so wanted to finish this year in person with my awesome students! I wanted to hug them, high five them, laugh at their jokes, and encourage them to the finish line! We made do with zoom, and they really handled it well. I was so thankful we could still keep the pace, engage in the subjects, and celebrate the end the best we could. The girls also shifted to zoom and youtube videos. We met with the whole F/E community via zoom for opening ceremony and presentations, doing the science experiments on our own. It was a fun year for home science, actually, because we built egg drops, straw towers, straw bridges, and catapults. Isaiah joined in the fun as well.

Crazy hair day for Challenge A!

We are thankful for a pretty view during many, many days at home! Spring was truly beautiful this year!!

Although quarantine screams "PUZZLES!" I just don't think we are very committed to finishing puzzles...

Thankfully, I had already purchased a cow eyeball for each of my students to dissect. They each got that in their end-of-year bag along with their BlueBook exam, candy, and some other goodies.

Isaiah ROCKED his BlueBook exam and Challenge A in general. He proved to be self-motivated, hard working, committed, and humble in his studies. Here is his (almost) final map. (We realized a few minutes later that he had forgotten Australia!) A major part of Challenge A is memorizing the world. Here is the WORLD drawn and labeled from memory. Every country, most capitals. Amazing. 

Each ChA student got some silly string for an end-of-year silly string fight with their teacher-mom :) I was a PROUD ChA Director/Teacher/Mom -

Faces of History shifted to an online format as well. Sweet Noelle was really disappointed that she couldn't make a display board. She loves creating the board and it is kind of a reward for completing the research paper. She rolled with the punches, though, and proved to be an elegant and beautiful Eleanor Roosevelt for her zoom presentation. That evening, we also had a Medieval feast, since we were in Cycle 2. It was fun to eat with our fingers and have a themed meal!

And Noelle earned Cycle 2 Memory Master! This year was a big leap because she had to memorize all of her multiplication facts from 1x1 through 15x15 out of order. She worked HARD on this for months. This was among the 12 minute timeline and 24 items to memorize for each of the other subjects - History, Science, English, Latin, and Geography. She did one proof with me, one with Luke, one with her tutor, Mrs Green over zoom, and one with Mrs. Tanner in the backyard from 6 feet apart. Woohoo!!

And this year's end-of-school gift was a little richer than usual.... an iPad mini! We figured this would be a fun activity for the kids to do together - making/editing movies, etc. They were pretty excited and have used it daily, mostly for Marco-Polo-ing with family and friends!