Week 36 in review: school year done!

Friday was our last day of school, and just like any brick-and-mortar school on the last day, we did almost no school work! Instead we went to swim practice and later dropped Anna off for a birthday swim party/tea party/slumber party (whew! that mom must have been exhausted!). In fact, that's how much of our last few weeks of school have been -- fitting our school year schedule into the new summer schedule. Nevertheless, we made progress and finished up a number of books.

Anna: It was a great feeling of accomplishment when she closed her Rod and Staff grammar book for the last time. She is on Lesson 22 for math, and will continue to work on math through the summer. She will also work on Latin through the summer, since she is about half-way through Primer B. She also made a little progress on her Reformation reading list, and completed Mind Benders B3, and practiced some writing skills by writing to her pen pal. I don't mention her "for-fun" reading very often, but for the last several months she has been reading the Lord of the Rings books aloud with her dad at nights. They are half-way through the last book, and she is hooked. Several times a day she makes some comment about how this or that relates to something she read in one of the books.

Ryne: As I type, Ryne is eagerly looking over his MUS Gamma workbook that he will soon be starting. He has one more lesson in Beta. I had a brief moment of panic when he got 6 answers wrong on his last Beta test. He's rarely missed more than one on a test the entire year, and now six?! But then I got a laugh when he explained he just wanted to try his column addition a different way -- the way aliens do. So it wasn't his math skills, it was the autism that got 6 answers wrong on the test! Ryne still struggles with determining when and where he can do things like this. To him a test seemed like a fine place to try out "alien math", whereas most children would realize the inappropriateness of such a choice. I am thankful for these moments, however, because we are able to pinpoint areas to work on. Ryne also finished The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Bring the Classics to Life. Like the Swiss Family Robinson book I wrote about in the last review, this was a Level 1 book, but the comprehension questions seemed a little more challenging. He really enjoyed the book, and I still plan to blog about Ryne and reading comprehension sometime this summer.

Grace: She finished up Bible Pictures to Read and Bible Pictures to Color by Rod and Staff. She loved these books! It was a great choice for her Kindergarten year, and I wish R & S had more of these books. Reading continues to go wonderfully. We will continue that and math over the summer. We never did start the phonics worksheets again because the order between her reading book and the phonics got so off that I was afraid she would get confused. So we will concentrate on finishing the reading book first and then decide when to start up the worksheets again.

Since I mentioned Anna's bedtime reading, I will also mention that while Marc has been reading with Anna I have been reading through the Narnia books with Ryne and Grace. We have finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and the Boy, and this week we finished the Magician's Nephew. It is a great feeling to have both kids begging me to keep reading more when I close the book.

We celebrated the last day of school with a few small gifts: Anna received a tote bag she really liked, Grace a fuzzy bathrobe she's been requesting for almost a year, and Ryne got a Nerf gun. So another school year is done, and overall I feel like it went well. Every year is an improvement, and I feel so blessed to be able to spend my days learning with my kids. This week is Grace's ballet performance, so I will be busy preparing for visiting grandparents and driving to dress rehearsals and swim practices. Next week I will focus on our planning for the 2009-2010 school year.

Happy Homeschooling (or planning, for those of you on a break)!