A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

KCHC Graduating Class of 2025! For reference--there's our girl! Graduation pics are here! There are some I still need to purchase, but these are the free ones so far. Nature Angel and her friend, the other senior in American Rhythm, performed their senior duet at the graduation.   They were awesome! Look at the height she got on that heel click! And here they all are, ready to be official.   Celebrating their accomplishments! Here's how she got to this point: Did she do more than is recorded in her 12th grade year? Yes. I just didn't bother to record it because she had more than enough credits to graduate. Nature Angel can read, write, compute . . .  actually, I looked up this chart: If I ask her to do one of these things, she will do it very well.   She communicates clearly, effectively, and kindly. She is responsible with money. She is able to learn what she wants to learn when she wants to learn it. She is able to learn what someone else requires. She ha...

  Everyone but Pixie--and she watched the live stream. That's Grandma in the front--Grandpa was in California taking care of a rental property. The graduation was long and lovely.   Six musical or dance numbers and three speeches. The presentation of 36 graduates individually with slide shows and personal bios read aloud as parents presented the diplomas. Tributes to military family members. Tributes to the graduation coordination committee. Tributes to two "graduating mothers" who were presenting diplomas to their youngest children after having homeschooled 40 years and 25 years respectively. It made me do some math . . . by the time I graduate Baymax and Lola, I will have homeschooled for 30 years. Pretty cool. We had about a bajillion photos taken, but we're waiting for the photographer to edit and release them, so they will have to be posted sometime in the future. In the meantime, Nature Angel had her last day of homeschool on Thursday of this week. We were going...

 In many ways, it was a regular week of school.   Morning Meetings, bedtime reading, history with the high schoolers, history and literature with the younger kids, math for all of those still finishing, copywork for those still finishing, various independent work for the high schoolers. And another one is done!  Mister Man finished Pre-Algebra. We did go to the psychiatrist for both blood work and a follow-up appointment.  Brother is very stable, so we're not messing with his meds, but Beowulf is still struggling, so we tweaked one med and are hoping for good results in the coming weeks. These two boys are now readers!  They read the whole time we were at the lab and in the psychatrist's office.  So many people commented on how cool it is that they can and do read so intently. Lola is a pretty big concern right now because she's so angry and so easily provoked that she's spending too much time away from us all in order to calm down.  I totally app...

 I think we were busy more nights than we were not.  I can only remember doing bedtime reading twice during the week. One night the kids just played outside until really late. One night Sir Walter Scott was helping Belle buy her first car, and I was dealing with our van being in the shop. One night was the Civil Air Patrol annual awards dinner. One night was Uncle M--'s birthday. One night was our Friends and Family dance finale. Ceremonial cake-cutting with a sword! Waiting while honors are read aloud before receiving their Mitchell awards The big girls and I love it when there's a matching/timeline/grouping/card-moving activity for history. I found that Lola had been busy with spring wildflowers. Just sitting by the front door. :) We're still running 3x weekly.   Except for Lola. She's going to the park with us, but she's studying flora and fauna. There's a bird's nest with a mama bird in there . . . actually more than one! She seems to have bewitched the ...

Nature Angel graduates in about 8 weeks.  She took a series of gorgeous photos with Pixie, but the emotions of the day were so hard that when she looks at those pictures, the hard comes back to her.  She's not able to separate the emotions from the quality of the pictures. So she hired a friend who is just getting her photography business started and had a totally different photo shoot. Here are some of my favorite results. My main reaction is "How gorgeous is she !?!?!" (I admit, I do react that way to all of my daughters.) And then I wonder how it is that she's a young adult . . . I remember her like this most of the time: Nature Angel:  1 year As more of my children reach adulthood, the sense of change--of time gone by--gets stronger. But this week, Nature Angel didn't feel well, so we only had high school on Monday.   On Tuesday, Little Princess had the opportunity to go to the state capital as part of a CAP event.  She got to tour a few buildings, meet...