finishing our first school year

Finishing our Oregon Trail unit at the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. They had so much fun in this pretend school set, they didn’t want to leave!

Tomorrow, we finish our first full year of homeschooling - Lucy finishing 4th grade and Zinni finishing Kindergarten. 

What a year it has been; it’s hard to find words to express my pride in how much I’ve seen them learn and grow. I spent a fair part of this week creating their assessments, and I am blown away as I realize just how much they know. 

They’ve memorized poems, quotes, books, dates, and numbers in multiple languages. They can name all the presidents. They can sing the borders of the United States and countries from several parts of the world. They memorized nearly 250 spelling/vocabulary words each.

Doing their math at a doctor’s appointment

We read around 20 books aloud together, some highlights of which were the Kirsten and Kaya series from American Girl, Little House on the Prairie, and Sarah, Plain and Tall. (And I think I cried at some point reading just about every one!)

Zinni has learned to read and write, and it’s given her so much power and confidence. She completed Kindergarten math and has already begun first grade math. She created reports on Moose, Corgis, John McLoughlin, Donald Trump, and an Oregon Trail pioneer girl she created. 

Lucy has worked so hard to push through her math, and she’s done it excellently. I remember getting her homework back when she was in school, seeing pages of multiplication problems that I knew she knew the answers to, and yet she’d only be getting 10-20% of them right. Now, it’s the absolute opposite. I even made her a little blue ribbon that says “Badge of Accuracy” because she hardly ever makes careless mistakes anymore. Even though math is her “least favorite subject,” she has done an incredible job and learned fractions, long division, area/perimeter/volume, degrees, percentages, and more. Besides math, she created reports on the Northern Grasshopper Mouse, Rabbits, John McLoughlin, Calvin Coolidge, and an Oregon Trail pioneer girl she created. 

I am particularly proud of Lucy; she was struggling to thrive in public school, only doing average work compared to what we know she was capable of, and most of all having a hard time with the overly stimulating social environment. We decided to try this at home and see how it went. My goal for this year was to re-instill a love of learning, and to instill the satisfaction in a job well done. I believe both have happened. She soaks in new information, stories, and facts eagerly and with curiosity. And she puts her best into so many details of her work - whether it is writing her vocab lists with pristine handwriting, or writing a full and creative imaginary “letter” from her pioneer girl, or listening intently to the books we’ve read together, she has been all in. Has she been thrilled about it every minute? No. But all in all, she’s been so much fun to teach, and I’m so glad we had the chance to change things for her.

So well done, girls. We had our ups and downs, our learning curves, our tough days, our tears. But we also had so much joy, so much excitement, so many interesting ideas and stories, and so much togetherness. 

Meeting “John McLoughlin” at the John McLoughlin House

Here’s to a year done. We have so much to be proud of!