The Season of Endings Begins

 We've entered the season of finishing.

Baymax finished math.

Brother, Ladybug, Beowulf, and Lola have finished various math/language arts worktexts, and they're down to only 2 worktexts to go to finish for the year.

Little Princess finished American Government.

The kids and I have memorized all 47 US Presidents in order.  We're now trying to memorize some interesting facts about each president and develop a sense of each president's season of influence.

We finished Little Britches and Great Expectations.  Both books inspired so much discussion!  (In totally different ways, of course!)

I do have to comment that I knew a sad ending was coming in Little Britches, but the kids were taken off guard--kind of blindsided.  It was rough to watch them react, and I have a hunch this is going to be a book they're not willing to revisit any time soon.

We picked up Shadow Spinner by Susan Fletcher as our next bedtime read aloud--it's a spin off of 1001 Arabian Nights.  

The high schoolers voted to start A Midsummer Night's Dream on Monday.

(But maybe we'll start it a week from Monday . . . we need a spring break.)

We were unable to schedule a dance performance to take the place of the one that had to be canceled, so we've had practices focused on clogging technique/form.  They've been intense and so good for our group.  The mom taking Nature Angel's place as teacher has experience as a swing dancer, so she and her husband are going to do a swing workshop with the kids next week, and then we have our end-of-year dress rehearsal and show.  

The kids have had Tahitian dance rehearsals 3 nights a week, and it looks like that schedule is going to continue until mid-May when Island Fest happens.

The boys had a church basketball tournament on Saturday.  They made it to the finals, but lost in the end.  It was a day of good sportsmanship and camaraderie.

Little Princess was installed as Cadet Commander of her CAP squadron.

That's her on the right with the Senior (adult) Commander on the left. 
(The young man facing them is a flight commander, and he's in the picture because that's his place in the room in front of his flight.)

She'll serve in this capacity for the next year, supervising a team of about a dozen other cadets over a squadron of over 50.

She also received notification that her staff position at encampment will be Assistant Officer in Charge of Standards/Operations (or something really close to that).  She will help lead the team in charge of daily inspections and teach standards of dress, behavior, and operations.

In addition to those duties/activities, she was also accepted into two CAP camps--officer training and a space camp.  Those will all take place this summer.

Mister Man applied to be part of the CAP Cyber Patriot team for the coming school year.  More news on that as we receive it.

The kids have engaged in various church activities including cleaning sacrament equipment (Baymax), survival skills (older girls), yoga (younger girls), basketball practice for the tournament mentioned above (boys).  We had one set of church activities canceled due to tornado/thunderstorm warnings in our area.

We're still doing library days, and the kids are out daily playing ball with neighbors.

Lola makes us laugh by drawing random tiny pictures on our various whiteboards in the house.

Where does she get her ideas?

In spite of extreme temperature swings (from 90 on Saturday to 17 and snow on Sunday a week or two ago), we tried a round of garden planting only to have it fail.  We'll try again soon.

And we'll keep working on our school until we finish.

(Though I'm in the happy throes of imagining and planning for next year.)