Year End Homeschool Celebration

Tapestry of Grace strongly encourages the holding of a "unit celebration" at the end of each 9 week unit of study throughout the year. This is a great idea for a number of reasons such as, a unit celebration is like a period (or exclamation point!) that marks a certain period of study as being DONE. In this way it is a powerful mental tool. It also helps remind the children of all the things they learned, made or did while studying that time period, and it tends to be the thing children will remember later when asked the inevitable question, "what did you learn in school this year?".

Well, I was not good this year about holding unit celebrations, so instead we decided to have a big celebration at the end of the year for all 4 units we covered. We invited 3 other homeschool families to join us (none of whom use Tapestry), as well as my husband's parents, and each of the children were encouraged to present something to the audience. It was a great evening of fun, encouragement, and inspiraton!

We displayed the Impressionist Art projects we made the last day of school.



And some of the books we used during the year.


Each of our 4 older children worked on state notebooks this year, adding information and coloring the state bird and flower for each state in the order they were added to the Union. Here is the stack of 4 state notebooks, with a few flapbooks in the front (one on Napoleon Bonaparte and the other on Andrew Carnegie).


And here is the first North Carolina page in our son G's state notebook. I got these state pages from Notebooking Pages, and they worked beautifully this year!


We also displayed many of the hands on projects we worked on throughout the year, which I have highlighted on my blog before. Here are the moccasins and nature journals we made when we studied Lewis and Clark.


And the covered wagons we made when we learned about westward expansion.


Here is our replica of the Monitor, made from a soy milk container! Its turret has 2 guns (see the black dots?) and rotates! (smaller can is inside the big one, and the big one turns around the smaller one)


Here are the shields we made when we learned about the European colonization of Africa.


And here are most of the children, ready to begin! There were a couple of younger ones you can't see that were playing in their own special area in the very back. And the dads and the grandparents were not yet seated.


My friend Sally helped her 2 year old sing the alphabet song. He did a great job and it was the cutest thing ever!!!


Her 5 year old sang us the story of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?" by Eric Carle while holding up each animal he had colored.


Her 9 year old daughter read a story she'd written using Institute for Excellence in Writing.


And her 12 year old also read a story he'd written using IEW. They both did a super job!


My friend Angela's 9 year old daughter read us a page from her "All About Me" book.

While her 5 year old daughter showed us the alphabet book she made during her preschool year.


Each of our children chose to dress up in some costume representing figures from the 1800's. Our Little Man dressed up as an Indian. He recited a poem from the poetry book we have memorized from all year, Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization. I didn't upload a video of it, but here are the words to his poem:

Ooey Gooey was a worm, a mighty worm was he
He stepped upon the railroad track, the train he did not see!
Ooey, Gooey! (said while rubbing hands together)


Our son C also dressed up as an American Indian. He recited the poem, "The Vulture" by Hilaire Belloc.


Our son L, trying to look like a manly cowboy here and therefore not smiling, recited "Swan and Goose" by William Ellery Leonard.


Son G, dressed as a Union soldier from the Civil War, recited "Jonathon Bing" by Beatrice Curtis Brown. He also read a report he'd written on Stonewall Jackson. You can barely see a bit of gray sticking out from behind his left shoulder. This was his bedroll, strapped to his back! And you can see the tip of his gun leaning up against the table next to him.


Our daughter G chose to wear a hawaiian costume. We learned about the attempt to annex Hawaii as a U.S. territory in 1893, but President Grover Cleveland felt that since Hawaii still had a queen (Queen Liliuokalani, the last queen of Hawaii) it was a sovereign nation and should not be annexed. It eventually was annexed 5 years later, but as you know, did not become a state until many years later. G recited "Rebecca, Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably" by Hilaire Belloc. A fun poem! And she also read a report she'd written on Ulysses S. Grant.


Finally, we had the pleasure of hearing Teddy Roosevelt (aka my husband) recite "Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. If you are not familiar with that poem, it was written about a specific and tragic charge that British troops made to capture French guns during the Crimean War.


When presentations were finished, we enjoyed desserts and some 1800's period food. We had pineapple to represent Hawaii, corn to represent the Indians and the fields that escaped slaves would hide in as they fled from their slave masters.


Hard tack to represent what people ate on the way west, and also what soldiers ate during the Civil War, and tomatoes which were introduced to our country from France by Thomas Jefferson. Not pictured, ham lunch meat to represent Virginia Ham!


It was a very fun evening, and everyone enjoyed seeing and hearing what the others had learned. I encourage other homeschoolers to consider doing unit celebrations or a year end celebration ~ it can be done beautifully and elaborately such as my friend Laurie does, or simply and cheaply such as we did, but either way it is a great way to look back and thank God for all that you accomplished during the year!