Kid Tribe

I've got to write a post about our co-op this year. It was fantastic. I'm so glad we have these homeschool friends. This semester we did anatomy and marine biology. The kids learned a lot. It was fun to have Annie explaining the parts of the heart and how the blood goes through it to her MD uncle William. She knew it! I didn't know that stuff. I taught the skeletal, muscular, and respiratory systems.

But the best part wasn't the school work aspect. It was the friendship among the kids. They lived for their playing time together. They had all these games and voting systems for which game would get played during their break. They were quite good (as far as I could see) at including everyone. I loved having the mixed ages. Scotty got along well with and looked up to a nine year old boy who was really sweet to him.

And one of the best things about doing the co-op was watching Scotty sort of come out of his shell. With co-op and with our little Monday school, Scotty learned to stand on his own. It was great to watch him gain confidence. Here are some pictures of co-op and Monday school throughout the whole year.

 Scotty broke his arm at Monday school. Monkey bars.

The Purple Dragons and Piano

Annie played volleyball this spring through the city. It was her first experience with organized sports. I had signed her up and was getting emails about it. They needed coaches. In one conversation with Aaron, I went from, "I will never coach, not in a million years" to "You know, I think I should probably volunteer to coach." Mostly, that was because I wanted to get the practice day and time of my choice. Anyway...I was a coach. Luckily, it turned out that this other dad really wanted to coach but hadn't volunteered because he was going to miss a game or two. So I was the assistant. I was much happier with that role. 

Annie had a good little team. There were three girls from the ward also on the the team. I think they lost 3 and won 6. It was fun to see them progress. And they did progress, although at this age everyone still gets excited when a serve is returned. If there is an actual volley, the whole crowd goes, even the team who didn't get the point.  

I was really proud of Annie. She was a very consistent server and got a lot of passes back over the net. And she worked really hard at practice and always had a good attitude. She was definitely an asset to our team.  

Annie had a spring piano recital as well. She has made a lot of progress this year in her playing. The recitals are fun because it's just a bunch of awesome families from our ward. Aaron wrote one of her recital pieces. That was cute. I liked the song. Aaron said he got really sick of it. But that's true of any recital piece, right?