The end of the school year was a whirlwind of activity!  It seemed for a couple weeks there that nearly every day was a field trip or a party or an award ceremony for the schoolies, while on the homefront we were busily compiling our portfolios and completing our testing and evaluations. But it all got done, whew!

Lewis had a great year.  He can verbally count to ten now, recognizes most of his letters, and can copy text beautifully.  He was loved by his peers and teachers both in his life skills class and his third grade mainstream class.    Here is he with his dear little friend Jude on his field trip to the natural history museum:

He is currently attending half days of school for his extended school year, and thriving there as well, and he will definitely be going back to school in the fall.

Teddy will also be joining Lewis in school next year. The services have been so good for Lewis that we really feel this is the best way to meet the needs of our special boys, though they will certainly be a handful in the same life skills class next year!  Brothers, through and through!

Bea also finished her year with a bang.  Both she and Ro participated in the track team in the late spring.  Bea’s teacher also chose to honor her with the Citizenship Award for showing good character and leadership qualities.  This girl loved every minute of her year of school, but is very excited to come back home next year (as we are to have her back). She made her decision a couple of months ago and never looked back.

Romilly also had an excellent year.  She won the Silver Pen Award for writing excellence for a fictional story which I will share here in photos.  I can’t read it without ugly crying.

Her sixth grade graduation was such a special day.  It was clear how hard she had worked and how this year had accomplished so much of what she hoped it would for her.

Please pray with Ro as she continues to struggle with her decision about school for next year.  She was solidly in the go-to-middle-school camp until a few weeks ago, then just as solidly in the come-back-home camp, and now she is firmly on the fence.  We see advantages and disadvantages for her in both, but we mostly just desire for her to make a decision that she is excited about and has no regrets.  And I kind of need her to decide quickly, because I have to submit my homeschool paperwork for next year by the end of this month!

It feels weirder to brag about my homeschoolers, but they really all had an excellent year, too, pursuing different interests and making steady progress in their academics.  Pippa earned her motorboating license in June and was able to put it to good use on our recent camping trip.

Summer has been kind to us so far.  As I write this, Trevor and four kiddos are in England spending precious time with Trevor’s family.  Time that almost didn’t happen!  My blood pressure has been a bit on the higher side this whole pregnancy, but on the evening before they were due to leave it was higher than it had been before.  My midwife sent me to the hospital for bloodwork to rule out preeclampsia, and while I was there my blood pressure came right down and my bloodwork all came back normal.  She gave us the all clear for Trevor to go, and I have stayed perfectly healthy while they’ve been away.  We are so very thankful for God’s mercy in giving us such clear direction, as we had all been feeling a little uneasy about their traveling so close to my due date (which USED to be early September, but is now decidedly early August!)

They have had such a sweet time visiting extended family, while I have had a surprisingly peaceful time at home with my little brood of seven!

And the homefront:

It is quite possible that the next update I give here could be a birth announcement!  This pregnancy has flown by (what, with the lost month and all), and we are so excited to meet this new little life.  We would welcome prayers for my health and the safe arrival of the newest Young!

The Young Christian Academy just celebrated the 100th day of the school year with this fun (if somewhat so incredibly tedious!) craft (shamelessly lifted from Pinterest) on Friday.  I have no confidence at all that any of them actually has exactly 100 gumballs, which was the idea.  In fact, I’d say my confidence that there are exactly 100 gumballs is inversely proportional to how much I had to help the child count them.  Pippa’s and Ro’s might very well be perfect, as I had nothing to do with them.  Delia’s and Coraline’s most certainly are not.  You can count them all if you’d like and let me know how we did in the comments.

I thought this milestone might make a good time to give a little update on our school year, which is really ticking along much more smoothly than I expected it to.  My biggest concerns were for how Delia’s school day would look, since we still find so few things that she will engage in willingly.  I worried at the beginning of the year that I’d have nothing to show for her year and put in her portfolio, but she’s really making good progress.  She and Cora are working through a big all-in-one preschool workbook as their main curriculum. This usually happens each day between lunch and Coraline’s naptime.  At the start of our year Delia hated “school time”, and it was a struggle just to get her to stay at the table.  Now she comes willingly (sometimes even signing “school” to initiate if I’m not quick enough to get us started!) and stays on task throughout our time, even if her ability to do the activities is still limited.  She still shows some resistance to coloring, but will now draw vertical lines down her coloring page and get a chocolate chip for her efforts.  She will attempt to place a sticker on a spot that I point to, but is still unable to find the hidden letters without my help.

We are supplementing the workbook curriculum for Delia with hands-on letter-building activities, counting activities, beading, flash cards, water-color painting and whatever else we find that interests her (or doesn’t but that we make her try anyway!).  We watch Signing Time and Super Simple Songs with her, which often does more to draw her out and get her verbalizing than anything else we can think to try with her.  She is increasingly interested in books and willing to sit and be read to, and continues to love to sing along to nursery rhyme books and the like.  I am reading and learning what I can about using ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis, a strategy recommended for children with autism) principles to plan new activities to engage her better.  Her attitude toward schooltime has improved a hundredfold since we started the school year, but in practice I am still doing a lot of hand-over-hand and wondering how much she is taking in.  In the meantime, Coraline may end up being the youngest Young ever to know all her letters and numbers, so my efforts are not going to be wasted.

The rest of the kids are divided into two “grades” for the more teacher-intensive subjects (history,science and read-alouds).  I tend to work mostly with Pippa and Ro on 5th grade reading materials while Trevor works with Niko, Bea and Junie on 2nd grade material.  We switch it up sometimes to keep it interesting, and I teach both of the science curricula since Trevor has a real job to fit in, too.  We have to tuck in school wherever we can sometimes to make it all fit (evenings and weekends are popular times to catch up on read-alouds, which the kids love anyway), but we never have to turn down a playdate or a Grandmom day when it comes up, and that’s how we like it.

Math, language arts and handwriting are grade specific, and we usually focus on those in the mornings.  The kids work mostly independently while I float and help as needed.  And drink coffee.

This sweet little person just generally hangs out with us and brightens everyone’s day.  She says “mama” and “dada” now and I feel like she might mean it.  She blows raspberries and definitely does mean that.  She waves enthusiastically and often.  She shows zero interest in signing and much prefers to let us know when her food isn’t coming fast enough by screeching at us.  So, yeah.  We’re working on that.

She can stand holding onto something if we put her there and really wants to pull herself up on the coffee table but so far hasn’t managed to.  She gets around very well on her tummy, and she gets her knees under her more and more, but she still hasn’t quite mastered the whole crawling thing.  Did I mention she’s sweet?  That’s still probably her main superpower.

For the most part, I feel like the system is working.  Everyone is learning stuff and getting smarter and largely enjoying what we do.  They spend their free time reading, writing, drawing, lego-ing, pretending, crocheting, and perhaps over Christmas break there may have been a bit too much of watching Pentatonix on youtube, but in general I feel pretty good about all the things that are happening around here.  It’s been a good year so far.  And just 79 more days till summer!

It was a ho-hum kind of day around here today.  Daddy decided early on that he’d be spending the night near work because of the snow expected, but there wasn’t yet enough on the ground to have much fun with.  We made our own fun instead.

Nothing brightens up a dreary day like doing school dressed as Anna from Frozen with a pint-sized mermaid nearby and the Incredible Hulk flexing her stuff all through the house.

Tomorrow, there should be sledding, and snowmen, and Lord willing, Daddy will come home at the end of the day, and all will be right with the world again.