Take time to Start Looking Back

Ladies, I just wanted to encourage you to do something in the next week. Take some time to look back at the beginning of the school year and remember what your children were doing. Think about the things you’ve done together this year and how much you truly have accomplished. Get some perspective. It is so easy to forget just how far we’ve gone!

I started this process after breakfast this morning. My first task – have the kids clean out their backpacks. They each have a backpack where they can keep their personal papers from the year. They pull them out and exclaim over them, then put the papers in a file folder for me. They see history narrations (notebooking) they’ve made and comment on the things we read. We open their math book and go to lesson 1. We pull out sample pages from the entire year  (I’m ultimately using these for a portfolio for the state I’m in). They laugh at what ‘easy’ math they were doing at the beginning of the year and I remind them how hard it was when they first tried it.

I’ve taught an art class with one other family most of the year and after hanging their artwork for a couple weeks it has been stashed in a large artist portfolio, so we pulled out the stacks of art and they helped me sort through to find their own pieces. Each child had a stack of projects with lots of fun memories attached.

I will get on the computer to print out final copies of writing projects they’ve worked on this year.

I will sit and write a paragraph for each subject for each child sharing my memories of what we did and what they’ve learned in subjects that didn’t produce paper (for example, I’ll make a list of books they read and discussed for literature, and notes about our science studies and experiments).

With a large family this may take me a bit longer than a week…but it is worth it! Each year I am reminded how small, consistent efforts over time bring us so far. It doesn’t seem like we’re accomplishing a lot in our simple daily work, but it adds up.