Another Year in the Books!

We wrapped up the school year with a fun field trip to the Downtown Aquarium with Alex's Challenge class.  It was the most fun I've had on a field trip because I only to keep up with three kids (Logan, Ryan, and Alex) and there was so much more to see and do at the Aquarium than I expected!

The boys LOVED the shark train!

 

Petting the sting rays was lots of fun as well.  Our second time through I realized you could buy little fish to feed the rays, so it was much more exciting.

Lots of energy in this crowd but they were such good kids.

 

Back at school, I volunteered in the literacy library nearly every day to help check in thousands of books.  Alex was happy to pop in and say hello (many times) and I laughed so hard when I saw him with glasses!  Apparently a VIP privilege in his class is wearing glasses frames.  Now he won't stop bugging me to get his eyes checked because he wants his own glasses.

Finally, we had the celebrations of learning.  The second grade theme was the walk of fame and it was just amazing!

My last days with a second grader!!  sniff, sniff...

 

The kids each got up to present their favorite parts of second grade...

 

Alex with his wonderful teacher.  Thank God for women with character and patience who teach our little ones!

Outside the classroom on the walk of fame...you have to read why Alex is a star...

On our last weekend before summer, Ben spent some of his birthday giftcards and was thrilled to find Beatles records.  Once again, I'm convinced this kid was born in the wrong century.

I dragged everyone to the Museum of Natural Science because I was thrilled we got to see the corpse flower bloom.  It only blooms for about a day every 5-7 years and smells terrible...who wouldn't want to experience that?

It was totally worth the trip and after we recovered from the smell, we enjoyed the butterflies, like my very favorite Blue Morpho.

 

The kids just had to get through 2 1/2 more days before their big summer break and I got to celebrate Ben's year in his classroom.  Each kid presented a fun fact about a country he had researched.

 

They also presented maps and each discussed a topic they'd covered during the year.  I was so proud of Ben because he did a fantastic talk about Karankawa Indians.

Ben and his sweet teacher.

They could barely contain their excitement on the last day of school!

A side-by-side comparison of the school year.  Where did the time go?  They look like different kids!

Now it's helllloooooo, summer!!