School's Out

On Monday, we had our semi-annual homeschool review with the county Board of Education. This closed our fifth year of schooling at home. The meeting only took about five minutes for all four kids to prove they did sufficient school work since our last meeting in December. The county uses homeschoolers/former teachers to do this, so it's a fairly simple process. Everybody kind of knows what everybody else is doing so the whole thing turns out to be little more than a formality.

Connor and Kenzie still have some History to finish up, though. They do a ton of Language Arts during the year, so if they're not finished everything by Review Day, I usually let them put it all aside until next school year. But I like the History stuff they're doing so I'm making them finish that up this year. I also keep all the kids doing a little bit of math for the whole summer. I can't stand completely idle brains for extended periods of time. We wind up taking some time off for the summer, not never a straight two months.

Alex is a little peeved this morning. His History class had scheduled a field trip to the Spy Museum in D.C. today. But, his baseball team has been scheduled to play in the championship game today. Recent rain-outs have wreaked havoc on the schedule so this conflict was not in the plans. We told Alex he was not to miss his field trip. He has only played in two of his 19 games, and we're quite confident his playing time would not be increased today, so there is no way we would put a baseball game above this trip. His teacher is also giving extra credit to students who dress up as a spy. Alex was wearing shorts and t-shirt this morning when I told him, at Vicki's behest, to get his spy suit on. I got a really interesting look from him at that point (not my first one of the day). Besides, I told him I never want to see him wearing to school what he had on this morning. Just because it's a "tag day" (where they are allowed to wear something other than their uniforms), you still need to dress nice: not like you're heading outside to practice sliding into second in thunderstorm. Ugh. I admit I have very little fashion sense, but Vicki would have been pleasantly surprised that I caught that one.

We had about 5 or 6 inches of rain over the past few days, topped off by some really strong winds. On Mother's Day, at Vicki's parents' house, the kids did as they always do, and climbed the purple leaf plum tree. The next day, some of that wind blew this tree down. Now they need to convince Poppop to buy something else they can climb on.

Finally, here's some pictures of Kearsyn at the park the other day.