2017-18 End of Year Assessment and Transcript: Super Star

Super Star finished 9th Grade this year.

She loved early morning seminary--loved it!  Just like her older sisters did, she started the year getting up at 4:25 and getting carefully ready for the 5:30 departure.  By the end of the year, she was rolling out of bed at 5:15 and putting on make up in the car.  No matter.  She truly reveled in the experience of daily gospel lessons with a peer group.

We discovered this year that Super Star has a low-functioning thyroid, and we discovered that Synthroid has life-threatening side effects for her. 

It was a rough autumn.

To put it mildly.

I tried some diet-modifications for Super Star, but she rebelled against them, so she's just limping along and napping often while we study the issue. 

Well back into her childhood, we found that she has a lovely singing voice, and she asked me for voice lessons.  I told her that she needed to sing in the church choir to learn what she could there to show me that she was serious about it.  For the past couple of years, she's been quite faithful about her choir participation. 

We tried to find a private voice coach, but our work hit dead ends (expense and availability were issues). 

Then Super Star auditioned for a prestigious youth choir in our general area (hour long drives each way would have been necessary for rehearsals).  Super Star was offered a place in the choir before she even finished her audition piece.  But as performances were all on Sundays and would conflict with church attendance, Super Star prayed about it and subsequently gave up her place.

It was a gut-wrenching sacrifice.

Shortly after this, Super Star was given information about auditioning for a local musical.  She was accepted immediately and given a small solo as well as placement in the general song/dance troupe. 

And then that musical was cancelled!

The producers, however, are turning the show into an audio CD, and just yesterday, Super Star went to their recording studio to have her parts recorded.  She said the experience was, "Very cool!"

For now, Super Star is using YouTube videos to learn voice techniques and expand her range. 

They're working.  I hear her voice becoming stronger, and I long to help her find performance opportunities.

She's a writer.

She took November to do NaNoWriMo.  She produced 25,000 words in that month, and she's written another 10,000 or so since then. 

There was a point when she was grounded from the computer for many weeks because I found her engrossed in online "writing" groups that seemed like thinly veiled excuses for wasting time online and forming potentially dangerous virtual relationships.  She's now only allowed to use the computer in the kitchen--even though the music room that she was using is technically a "common room," I clearly cannot monitor her enough when she's there.

She knows that good writers read a lot, and I often hear her say, "I'm stuck in my writing.  I need to read more than I am."  And then she'll plow through stacks of library books before she returns to her writing.

Math continues to be a tremendous challenge for Super Star.  But she works hard, hard, hard at it, and Saxon texts seem to be a valuable resource for her.  She's made more progress this year than I thought possible.  She's embarrassed to be doing grade school level math and pre-algebra in Saxon 8/7, but I'm proud of her.  She's very good at understanding big concepts; it's the simple mechanics of basic arithmetic that trip her up--and that's not for lack of working at it!  She uses a multiplication chart and/or a calculator to help her.

She's growing out of her early adolescent awkwardness and anger into a graceful and more gracious late adolescence.  She is more and more often a friend and playmate to the littles than she used to be, and they love it.  Just the other day Little Princess came glowingly to me, "[Super Star] was so fun today while you were gone!  She played and played, and she's ticklish, but she let us tickle her, and she laughed and laughed with us.  We had so much fun!"

Six months ago, I heard only complaints about her from the young ones.

The change is delightful!

The Transcript:

Symposium = 3
Language Arts = 1
     Literature reading and narration
     Vocabulary from Classical Roots A & B
     NaNoWriMo and fiction writing through the school year
     Creative Freewriting Adventure
Math = 1
     Saxon Math 8/7
Science = 1
     Nature Studies & Ecology on family outings
     Apologia Marine Biology
 French = .5
     Memoria Press First Start French I
Religious Studies = .5
     Morning Meeting
     Personal scripture reading and journaling
     (Seminary attendance could count as another full credit, but so far we've opted out of that)
P.E. = .25
     Workout videos
     Strength training
     Reading and narrating nutrition and health literature related to hypothyroidism

That's a total of 7.25 credits for her freshman year of high school.