Willow: End of 8th grade

Willow had her last middle school choir concert. Mr. Bartley has always raved about how talented their grade level is. He gives them harder pieces and challenges them in a lot of ways. They had a great performance!

Songs:

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Here's the link for the school's videos. 

She was surprisingly emotional after the performance. She's chosen to be in the Performing Arts program at Burton next year, which prohibits her from being part of the high school choir due to having to take PE. Being part of the middle school choir has been such a great experience for her!

 Some of her choir friends before their performance:

The 8th graders had a fun afternoon outside to celebrate. Willow didn't take any pictures (gasp!!) but thankfully got this picture that a friend took.

They may be headed off to high school, but they still enjoy sweet innocence on the trampoline!

We had double graduations to celebrate this year! We enjoyed having family over to celebrate them both!

I hope this still fits when she's a senior!

The 8th grade graduation was held on WebEx. The first 15 minutes was breaking up so bad that you couldn't understand a single thing they said. Then they made an announcement that they'd heard about the choppiness and were going to speak slower. They did for a few minutes, which was a lot better, but then they forgot and it broke up a lot. Watching the closed captions wasn't helpful but did add a bit of humor to it. Willow was sitting just in front of the computer recording so it was fun to catch glimpses of her every once in a while. She received an award for All As, a presidential award, and the superlative of "Most Likely to be President." 

We're ready for time to slow down a little bit!!

All District Choir

Through school choir, Willow has the option of auditioning for the All-District choir which is made up of students in our surrounding area. She hadn't auditioned in 6th or 7th grades, but had built up the courage to try in 8th and made it! For auditions she had to sight read and sing "Beautiful Dreamer." There were a handful of other students from her school that participated and they practiced at lunch a couple times but essentially just practiced one day and performed that evening. It was quite impressive! She had a great experience!

The performance was at Liberty University. We had some time to walk around campus while we waited. We couldn't figure out why these swans weren't afraid as we approached the edge of the water to look at them closer...until we realized they were fake! Ha!

Willow is in the top row, just to the left of center.

Check out their songs:

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We're always grateful to have such support from our family!

After her performance I let her listen to a voicemail from Burton, which is a high school program that she applied to. She'd gotten accepted into two programs: Performing Arts AND Culinary. They were giving HER the option of which program she'd like to be a part of. What a compliment!!

Listening to music is pretty relaxing I guess!

Choir Concert

 Willow's school choir performed their winter concert. The director has the videos posted here. Here are the videos I took:

(One song was too long to upload here outside of YouTube. It's #9 on the YouTube link above)

Always grateful for this fan club!!

Science Fair

Our little baker did another science fair project involving baking this year. This time it was measuring the effects of gelatin on the stiffness of whipped cream. It involved LOTS of cupcakes (which she made from scratch) and LOTS of frosting!

Frosting with gelatin anyone??

A month later we had a different "science fair project" when we were all sick of cupcakes! :)

Fall Choir Concert

Willow had her fall choir concert and it was nice to see all of their faces without masks for the first time! 

 

First Day of School

The summer sure flew by and before we knew it, we were all headed back to school!

I started my 18th year of teaching and my 3rd year at a sweet school in the same county as the kids. Our sweet principal was moved to Willow's school (happy for her, super sad for us!!), so there's always nerves about new administration! So far so good!

Camp Read-a-lot is in full force!

Owen will be switching between 3 teachers in 5th grade, but his homeroom teacher is Mrs. Lusk, who was also Willow's homeroom teacher. We knew he couldn't go wrong with any of them!