New Job — today was the first day of my new job driving truck for Salvation Army. I came home a good tired — tired from a hard day’s physical work, instead of brain tired. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked physically like that. We started with a beautiful summer day on the Southside, but this afternoon, it became stormy. Before the storms blew through the temp and humidity were beautiful, afterward though it became sticky — typical Southside weather (the humidity.)

Promotion

Tonight was James’ Promotion Day. They had a very nice ceremony at the elementary school. A little side story, was they were having trouble making the laptop connect to the video projector — I know that story. I offered my services and they were glad for that. My first challenge was that it was a Mac. I haven’t seen that operating system in a while. After pointing me in the right direction for the control panels, I though, you didn’t even check the video connections. I checked those and BAM! up came the video. They had a very nice video presentation — When they showed the girls, they played Steven Curtis Chapman’s “Cinderella.” I didn’t recognize the boy’s song, but it was a country artist and it was a touching song as well.

After that, we had a little bit of Pomp and Circumstance as the students processed in and then sang a song. There was a little dance break in the middle. I wanted to capture that on video, but I missed it. Here is a short clip of the end of the song.

After that they gave out several categories of awards; art, physical education, citizenship, perfect attendance. We though James was going to go for a shut out, but then came the A/B honor roll category. James was the first name called (It’s nice to have a name that starts with A.
Here is James receiving his medallion for A/B Honor Roll.

The next category was the President’s Education Award. In order to receive this award, the student had to have a grade point average of 94 in all core subjects and all S’s in citizenship. James was called again and here is a picture of him receiving that award. Received a nice letter and certificate and pin from the President.

This was all more than Anna could handle This started her on a little pity party. She started by saying that she didn’t get a 5th grade graduation. Rebecca got both a 5th grade graduation and a 6th grade stepping up ceremony and James got a 5th grade graduation, but won’t be getting a 6th grade stepping up ceremony. After James got the Presidential
award, Rebecca reminded Anna that she had gotten that award in 5th grade too. Again Anna started whining about it I’m enjoying teasing her about it. None of the original was on video, but I turned on the camera and what you see here is the girls having a little fun.

What Anna says at the end is that it doesn’t matter because she is in show choir and beta club and National Honor Society.

We had a good night together as a family. One of our traditions that we missed last year is taking pictures with James’ teachers. So I’ve even included them. Have a great evening.

Summer will soon be here, our children are out of school. One of the things that we do since the girls were young was a reading program each summer. It started when we were in Indiana at the local library. The girls or us would have to read 100 books during the summer. We read the books before the girls could read. We still do it for James to get him reading. All of our kids love to read and they all get good grades because of this. Since we have not had a library that has a reading program, I put one together for each of the children. James in fifth grade now and he will have to read thirty-five books this summer. I let the kids pick a subject that they would like to read about and 7 of the books have to do with the subject that they pick. The rest of the books they can read any subject. After every five books, they get to do something special; like cook with mom, choose a DVD to watch, or pick the place we will be eating out at. At the end of the summer they get to pick a book to buy. Our children have chosen various subjects; such as when the Olympics were in Greece, Anna read about Greece. Rebecca did a trip though the twentieth century. The year we moved to New York, I had the kids read across New York State, we marked the kids progress using a New York map. That year the kids had to find books on a nature, a famous person, a book on baseball, an historical event, or a book about New York state. I even had them read about horses since we lived close to Saratoga Springs and it has a summer horse racing season.

James has started his reading for the summer and decided to read about places which you can visit. I do have to say it has been hard to find books on actual places for example; Big Ben, and the White House. So far he has been to Easter Island, the space station, a Japanese castle and the Death Star.