My, how homeschooling changes when your oldest starts working out of the home! Between his yard care business and working several fire mitigation jobs with Brian, “school” has taken on a very different look in Elliott’s life. This, of course, is one of the main reasons we chose to educate our children at home. Education is so much bigger than simply reading, writing, and arithmetic. Though we would like our kids to graduate after having excelled at those (and many more) academic subjects, if that is *all* they know by the time they are 18 then we believe we would have failed. We are so grateful that our son loves to work, and he has grown so much in his entrepreneurial skills these last couple of years. He wishes he could work full time rather than all of this boring school business, but thankfully he still has parents to guide him :). But seriously…how is it possible for him to have grown up so much in just 9 short months??
Our girl, too, has grown in so many wonderful ways. She continues to fall more and more in love with poetry and music and she is not merely content learning herself–this year she asked if she could give voice lessons to one of the little girls from our church. We heartily gave our permission and so did the little one’s parents. Selah worked with her a couple times a week for a few months until she was ready for the spring recital. Selah has also been accompanying more at church. One special highlight was that Selah played the piano while her best friend accompanied with the violin during “Amazing Grace” at the end-of-year performance.
As I reflect upon this last school year, the main theme that keeps running through my head is how wonderful it has been to do school with our church family. Our year at Via Bona Academy was once again so rich. Elliott and Selah got to learn academically alongside some of their best friends and also teach and love on the little ones from our church. What a beautiful picture of family. You almost couldn’t find Elliott without several children climbing all over him, and Selah was the most patient and joyful teacher to one of the preschoolers. Elliott and Selah had Greek, history, music and dance, vocabulary, economics, and art. Music and dance *may not* be Elliott’s favorite passtimes, but when his friends are there and the little ones need guidance, he jumps right in with joy. His music teacher even *somehow* got him to conduct for “Amazing Grace” during the performance.
Just like last year, I put together a hefty amount of memory work for the students. This year, however, the moms were prepared and ready to take on the challenge. Last year only 33% of the students completed their memory work, whereas this year 90% completed their memory work entirely! Each of those children was given a special book. In addition to the normal memory load, there was also a set of challenges which included memorizing a much longer (21 verses) passage of Scripture, three longer poems, the major events and battles of the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, The Gettysburg Address, and a pretty hefty excerpt from We Shall Fight on the Beaches. To our delight, eight children took up the extra challenge and completed all of it! The youngest challenge completer was six years old! Our reward for these children was dinner and dessert. However, Elliott and another young man completed the challenge CHALLENGE, which was to also memorize all of the verses that the church set forth to memorize. Because of their extra hard work, we rewarded all of the challenge crew with a Ferris Wheel ride. Well, at least WE thought it was a reward. Some of the children seemed to think it was more of a punishment. They survived, anyhow! And by happy circumstance, Abe Lincoln happened to be at our Ferris Wheel location, reciting The Gettysburg Address no less! So the children, who had all memorized his famous speech, even got a picture with the man himself.
It truly was a wonderful year and we are all so grateful for the learning and the joy and the fellowship and the breaking of bread. As Providence would have it, this was our last year with Via Bona Academy. That is not what we had been expecting, but it seems to be what God had planned from the beginning of time. Next year things will look a little different–and I look forward to sharing when I have the details!
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