Last Day of School

Before we left on our trip, we sat down with the kids and talked about our travel school schedule. We presented several options and listened carefully to the kids' feedback to come up with a system everyone would be happy with. Together we decided to do things a little differently this year (which is saying something when you are already homeschooling and doing things in an out-of-the-box sort of way). We decided to break our school year up into sessions and to do school when it made sense to do school and to take off when there were other things we wanted to do. Everyone agreed that it would be great to finish all our school sessions before we got on the Russian train. So, we had our first day of school in June, and we have been working hard to accomplish our goals. Today, we finished everything we had assigned ourselves to finish this school year (including an addition of the SAT test for Ruth*, which we hadn't originally planned on), and we all feel good about what we accomplished. We will, of course, still be learning through life, as always, and we will have weekly mini-sessions, to make sure we don't forget anything over the long summer break. But, other than that, we will purely be focusing on enjoying the last bit of our big RTW adventure. Serendipitously, we received our passports back today with our Russian and Chinese visas, which means everything is in order for our upcoming train trip. It was a great punctuation mark for our last day of school, since that was the carrot we had dangled for ourselves from the beginning. We celebrated our last day by throwing all of our school papers away, hosting a tea party for our neighbors/landlords, and going out for dinner.

School's Out!

Last Day of School Tea Party

*If you're curious, Ruth did fantastic on her SAT. She scored 1970 and qualified for a special summer camp, which she will attend in Saratoga Springs, NY, at Skidmore College, from June 26 to July15. We are so proud of her and excited about this opportunity!