End of School Activities

We moved our kids across five states exactly one month before the school year ended. Completely against every good advice book we read that told us to leave them in until the end of the year to avoid the trauma of having to change classes. But I figured I could pull a "mom knows best" card on this one. Here is why.

1.We needed to be together as a family. I am a lousy single parent. We needed to all live together in the same state and to have daddy in our lives. Involuntary separation is one this, but doing it when you have the option not to seems silly.
2. Summer is a lonely time when  no one knows you are there. We don't have a lot of kids in our neighborhood, so play dates have to be planned with at least a phone call. if no one knew we were back and no one had our number, and we had no way to get in touch with anyone, no one would get to play. The few weeks they had in the new school gave them just enough time to make some friends and trade phone numbers so we could play over the summer. Its also a good way to get noticed- no one notices the new kid on the first day of school. But everyone knows the new kid who comes in the middle. People are interested in meeting and befriending the new kid.
3. My kids are smart. They won't suffer academically from having to change curriculum or text books or miss a few end of year lessons. It was easy for them to just jump right in here.
3. No one is at the school during the summer. At least where we live, you can't get a single person on the phone until the few days before school starts. If your kids need special services, like nursing or gifted testing or special class placement, you won't get it. You will show up in the middle of the start of school rush, be put off until things calm down, and told to test with the rest of the school mid-year for next years stuff. So your kid gets to suffer all year because no one knew they were coming. We had three weeks to make appointments, take placement tests, meet with the nursing staff, and make our case for whatever services we wanted for the upcoming year and it worked fine. And it just three weeks they had to go without those services in the new school instead of a semester or two.
4. We got an to start summer vacation a month earlier here. It would have seemed wrong to go to school there until mid-June, then start school here the first of August, after only a 6 week break. Moving got them out of school mid May, so we could have more of a summer break.

So after we decided to move, it was a bit of a whirl wind. Most kids would start to slack off because they know they are leaving, but not mine. In fact, I was encouraging Lenna to let homework slide and do other stuff like packing her room the last week she was there because I already had the transfer papers filled out with her current grades, but she refused. I guess I am proud and not annoyed, sort of.

Anyway, the night before we moved my kids were at the school showing off their science fair projects. Lenna worked with a partner to do a taste test experiment on their class, trying to decide if the kids could tell the difference between regular, low fat, and sugar free ice cream. Her classmates were happy to help with their part and subject themselves to eating three different kinds of ice cream in the name of scientific research. In case you were wondering, the low fat stuff bombed but they liked the sugar free stuff just fine.
Andrew really wanted to make a scale model of the solar system. His project was titled, "If the sun was the size of a pizza, how big would the other planets be?" We made a little display with string showing how far the distances would be, and used some household objects as planets. Earth is a pea, btw, and Jupiter is half a tennis ball. Here they are with their displays.




We also arrived at our new school just in time for all of the end of year fun. Andrew was cast as a flipping beetle in the school play with a whole two days to learn his part. Lenna went to one gifted lesson and then was able to participate in the end of year celebration dressed as a Greek goddess. For her part she learned to tell her mother to make spanikopita and we all tried Greek yogurt and baklava. Then they went on a field trip or two, had field day, class parties, and were finished with first and fourth grade!

Because they finished so early, they were able to skype chat with their classrooms back in MD to say goodbye. I love technology, and technology-focused schools that have web cams and smart screens and other things in place that let kids talk to each other from five states away.