The school year that almost wasn't . . .

I've been postponing doing a wrap up post for our 2012-2013 school year, because, in my opinion, it was kind of a bust.  I know I had cancer, and we still did a lot, and the kids are fine and blah, blah, blah. Trust me, I'm very thankful to be alive and doing well, and I'm exceedingly happy that my kids are healthy and energetic.  It's all good.

However . . .

I still can't help feeling bummed out about the year that I had planned that never got to be.  I never got my mojo back this year, and we sort of flopped along, doing things because I felt we had to do them, rather than having the things fit in to my master plan of school cohesion and harmony this year.  I had such high hopes for this year in the beginning of September.

Okay, enough whining.

Here's the lowdown on the remnants of our school year:

Achievement Night at Co-op was great.  The kids showed off the skills they learned, and we socialized and ate lots of goodies.

Language Arts:

We finished all of our Town Level of MCT, except for the vocabulary program.  Not sure if we will continue with it next year, or just move ahead to the next level vocabulary program.  I'll decide when I do lesson plans this summer.

We did one last book club in May, where the kids discussed Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. For a change of pace, I had us listen to this one in the car.  We all enjoyed the story, even though it was a little more mature than the material they usually read for book club.

Eddie participated in a homeschool Spelling Bee and really enjoyed it.  I think we will do this again next year.

We are doing a Capitalization Boot Camp this summer because neither one of these kids knows how to capitalize proper nouns or sentences.  

Everything Else:

I spent a bunch of time scanning some of their work, as usual, but never realized I was scanning them all in as PDFs and not JPEGs, so the darn blog won't let me upload them.  Suffice it to say, I'm not going to spend anymore time scanning, so I'll just tell you what we've accomplished.

Andrew had his portfolio review in the beginning of May, and Ed took his standardized tests in the middle of May, so after that, our minds were pretty much closed to doing any more school for the year.

Even so, we managed to accomplish a few things.

Finished the math book.  Now these kids are experts at long division.  They also had a couple of units on Roman Numerals, finding the area of a cube, and an introduction to fractions.

We are on Chapter 28 of 42 in our history book.  We are working over the summer to finish it. We are currently learning about WWII and the Holocaust, so it's not the most fun we've ever had in History lessons.

We haven't done much formal science since we finished our textbooks in April, but here and there we've learned a few things and read a few books about scientific things.

Since my last blog post, we did a few exercises in French and Latin and Logic, but for the most part we've totally ditched those subjects for now.  Same with Health and Art.  The kids have come with me on several of my Couch to 5k runs, so I'm counting that as P. E. 

The boys took a class on light and sound waves at the Lake County Metroparks.  It tied in very nicely with our Physics study.

We did some more experimenting with dry ice.

Andrew is modeling the paper chain we made this year.  Each link represents a school book that they read or that I read to them.

Andrew made this body model in his co-op class.

For the last project in their lab books, the kids were to come up with their own experiment to see if they could convert one form of energy into another form.  Andrew wanted to convert kinetic energy into potential energy by pushing the car and letting it roll until it came to a stop at the edge of the table.  He got it to work at least once.

Eddie wanted to convert heat energy into chemical energy, which would in turn, create kinetic energy.  His experiment kind of worked, but didn't turn out as he originally thought it would.  That was a good lesson, too.

Eddie was very excited about our garden and helped me plant.

They took a class on flight dynamics at the Great Lakes Science Center with their friend.

We are doing a state history unit this summer.  There will be an entire blog post about that.

To finish off our Physics study, the boys made cool simple machines with some Kinex education sets.

We participated in an awesome Ancient Greek Pentathlon.  Andrew was a resident of Thebes, and Ed was a resident of Corinth.  They followed the leaders of their city-states to all the events.

Discus

Javelin

Long jump

Wrestling

Running race

We toured a chocolate factory.  The free samples were yummy.

As part of our Ohio tour, we visited the science and history museum attached to the William McKinley monument.  This place was a blast!

So, all in all, we had a pretty successful year.  The teacher who did our portfolio review was pretty impressed at all we had managed to accomplish despite the cruddy start to the year, so I feel good that the year wasn't a waste.

I'm looking forward to this coming school year, and can't wait to start the lesson plans.  We are going to do things a little differently than we have in the past, and I'm excited about it.  I think the kids will be, too.

Have a great summer, y'all.

Edited to add:

 I almost forgot to post about Andrew's last play at Theatre Class.  They did a play that Mr. Dusten wrote- it was a story within a story.  Very cute.  The two youngest kids were sitting at the front of the stage, reading a story book, and the story then came to life behind them.