May is easily the busiest school month and is right up there with December as the busiest month of the year, tops. I know public school is busy with all of their end of year things and you might think that homeschool misses some of that - but it doesn't. The month is packed with end of school events, Spring activities, and a mad push to squeeze in all the homeschool and as much sunshine as possible into the month. The kids started baseball and softball which meant at least one game on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights (and an additional mid-week game and Saturday game when Caleb started mid-may). Plus 1-2 practices a week for each child and wow, May is busy just because of sports, not to mention all of the other things going on. It's only a 6-week rec league, so it's manageable (certainly wouldn't be sustainable for longer than 6 weeks) and the kids really enjoyed it this year. I mention it here because of the busyness factor and impact on homeschool, but we have a whole separate blog post about it.
Again, I just want to say that this has been a great homeschool year. The kids were involved in a lot of neat classes, coops, and opportunities. The kids all learned a lot and I'm satisfied with the balance of education, family connection, and time for childhood over the space of the year. There are some things that I am excited about as the kids get older and our homeschool evolves but this year met our needs and I am grateful for the life we were able to live because of the lifestyle we have chosen to follow.
BizTown
The kids got free Chick-Fil-A coupons and so they took us out to dinner that night (David was out of town this week for work).
SPARK Coop
End of Thursday Coop
Last Day
End of School Celebrations
Here are some end of year highlights:
Homeschool:
The kids and I sat down and set goals for where we wanted them to reach in their course books by the end of the year. This was just as much encouragement for me as it was for them - to help us both stay consistent with our book work when we'd rather be playing in the sun (we did plenty of that, too). However, one of my favorite parts of the end of the school year is "project week". This year I let each of the kids pick their own project. Lydia did a business plan/entrepreneurial outline for her dog-sitting business "Lydia's Pet Care". This included making a logo, flyers, business cards, price breakdown, and other business related information. Austin chose a 3 part project: Build something, read something, write something. We learned about windmills and then he built a mini-windmill, read a book about windmills, and wrote a report about windmills. Caleb chose to do a Picture Book Bracket (we missed this in March and he really wanted to do it), we read SO many picture books and judged them against each other to find the grand winner: Feathers Together by Caron Levis (2nd Place: Mell Fell by Corey R. Tabor)
End of School Extras
Here are some of the other end-of-school extras that we enjoyed this month:
Book Club: Nothing Else but Miracles by Kate Albus
" a hopeful World War II story about three scrappy siblings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan." We made crullers, sampled pickles, and discussed the book. We enjoyed this book a lot - it was also interesting because Lydia was concurrently reading "Number the Stars" and the "Diary of Anne Frank" both also about WWII. We had some good discussions about how difficult things were all over the world, and how differently the war affected different people. These kids were kicked out of their apartment and had to survive while their dad was overseas fighting vs a Jewish family trying to escape the horror of war. War is terrible, always, and the impacts are far-reaching. But how grateful we were that this dad went to fight so that other families were spared, even though it was hard. (Jeez, now I'm crying as I type - I'm grateful for the example of brave people. And also, I like donuts and pickles so this was right up my alley.)
" a hopeful World War II story about three scrappy siblings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan." We made crullers, sampled pickles, and discussed the book. We enjoyed this book a lot - it was also interesting because Lydia was concurrently reading "Number the Stars" and the "Diary of Anne Frank" both also about WWII. We had some good discussions about how difficult things were all over the world, and how differently the war affected different people. These kids were kicked out of their apartment and had to survive while their dad was overseas fighting vs a Jewish family trying to escape the horror of war. War is terrible, always, and the impacts are far-reaching. But how grateful we were that this dad went to fight so that other families were spared, even though it was hard. (Jeez, now I'm crying as I type - I'm grateful for the example of brave people. And also, I like donuts and pickles so this was right up my alley.)
Swimming Lessons
I love that our rec center offers homeschool swimming lessons. We went once a week for two months while the kids refreshed their swimming skills just in time for summer to hit.
BizTown
I taught a 12-week business/finance course at SPARK Coop and we finished with an amazing day at BizTown with our group. This is typically targeted to 5th graders, and Lydia was able to go last year - but I wanted them to do it again so they could both go. I think we will do it again when Austin is in 5th grade because it's such a good experience. The kids were assigned companies and went to a simulation where they were that company for the day. Beforehand they learned a lot about personal finance and the way money/people/banks/stores/businesses work together. Lydia was the CEO of Dominion Energy and Austin was an Energy Expert for Dominion Energy. I headed up the other group who was in charge of JA Marketplace.
The kids got free Chick-Fil-A coupons and so they took us out to dinner that night (David was out of town this week for work).
Field Trips
Biztown and Lagoon were two of our biggest field trips of the year, but we still managed to squeeze in a trip to the Planetarium and some park time. (Note: Lagoon gets it's own post.)
Biztown and Lagoon were two of our biggest field trips of the year, but we still managed to squeeze in a trip to the Planetarium and some park time. (Note: Lagoon gets it's own post.)
SPARK Coop
I really need more time and space to write everything that I have to say about SPARK here, but because I'm not sure I will get the chance I will write just a few things. We joined spark Fall of 2022 (2 years ago). At that point it was called Ola Nani and it was a homeschool coop that was conveniently run out of a building just a few blocks from our home. We hadn't even been a part of a coop before and I felt drawn to it for our family that year. After only a few weeks, the coop organizer lost the building space and was going to disband the coop until Dani Martin stepped in and did the work to find a new building space. She stepped into the role as director and held the coop together with her talent and force of will. I offered my help to her and soon we were co-directors of the coop, adjusting the things that we felt needed to change and acting as fearless leaders for our coop families. We ran the coop together for the remainder of these two years and it was such an incredible experience. It was so good for our kids and community building for us. It was also a lot of work and after two years, we were both ready to pass the torch to a new set of directors. I loved that my kids were able to take so many different classes on so many interesting topics and I also enjoyed teaching classes about things that I was interested in. However, I am feeling the pull to take our homeschool and our family in a different direction, so in additional to stepping down as director - I've also decided that our family won't be coming back to SPARK this year. (Maybe in future years, but not this next one.) It's been a hard decision and a very sensitive one because I didn't want to leave the coop without knowing that it would be able to continue on without me and didn't want the people to feel abandoned. But the new directors are going to be great and I feel good about the path for our family. I'm grateful that we can end the year with sincere gratitude for all that SPARK Coop provided for our family.
The classes the kids were in this semester: BizTown, Electric & Circuits, Science Experiments, Dance, Art Preschool Music class.
End of Thursday Coop
Austin started attending this coop with Lydia in January and it's been the best thing for him. This group is made up of such incredible kids and I love that because of our homeschooling lifestyle our kids get to run shoulders with these other amazing families. If I could pick any boys/girls for my family to grow up next to, to learn with and learn from, to have the important childhood friendships with - it would be these families. (Which, obviously - duh, because I can pick and this is who we picked.) Thursday Coop ended with a market day where the kids made items to sell to each other and the last week was a pool party. This backyard is magical, I tell you. I hope my kids have incredible memories of their childhood here.
End of Mini-Coop
Mini Coop was a great thing for our family this year. It gave Caleb some additional social time, which he enjoyed, it helped focus me to make sure that Caleb and Lucy were getting some fun projects and attention while the big kids were at coop, and it brought in a little bit of money that was able to go right back into our homeschool fund.
Mini Coop was a great thing for our family this year. It gave Caleb some additional social time, which he enjoyed, it helped focus me to make sure that Caleb and Lucy were getting some fun projects and attention while the big kids were at coop, and it brought in a little bit of money that was able to go right back into our homeschool fund.
Last Day
I think I was the most excited person on our last day of homeschool. We marked off where we had gotten to in our bookwork and celebrated by putting all of our school stuff away!
End of School Celebrations
The last week of school we did our annual read-a-thon, end-of-school cones, and we hit the neighborhood pool! We loved this year, but are SO excited for summer!
