Griffin, Maggie, and Oliver have been experimenting with stop-motion animation with legos. This is a sample of one of their works-in-progress.
Tag Archives: Griffin
Griffin’s Application to SPA
As the school year kicks off, I’ve been spending more time on my laptop, and I keep running across files that I intended to post over the past year. (It was a very busy year!)
Attached below is a scanned copy of Griffin’s handwritten admission “essay” that he filled out last January when he first applied to St. Paul Academy (where I teach). I love it that he filled it out on his own without any input from Sarah or me. It’s a great snapshot of his thinking in the middle of a his sixth grade year. At this point, he hadn’t been at an in-person school for ten months.
You can view it below or click the download link below to view it in a larger window.
Roy Virtual Gathering
I found this screenshot while cleaning up my computer today. It’s from a Roy virtual get-together on March 14, 2021. Some of us were having fun with virtual backgrounds.
It’s odd to think that in the five+ months since this shot was taken, two of the three Roy-boy families have moved into new homes.
First Day of Seventh Grade
Griffin is joining me at SPA (St. Paul Academy) for seventh grade. We will be driving to school together each day in our electric car. Although I don’t teach him, I will see him around school regularly. We are both quite excited.
Yahtzee!
On our final night at Camp Du Nord, Griffin and I played a tremendous game of Yahtzee, with five yahtzees between the two of us!
The Band’s Back Together
Or at least our family band.
Griffin and Sarah returned this evening from their separate adventures up north. Sarah was preparing for trail crews at three different forest service sites (as part of her job with Mobilize Green). Griffin was backpacking on Isle Royale where he had a ton of fun and apparently fed every bloodsucker on the island (by the look of his legs).
We’ll add more details in the coming days. I’m just glad we managed to locate pillows and sheets for everybody.
Griffin’s Adventure Begins
Griffin is off on a two week backpacking adventure at Camp Widjiwagan. Sarah drove up with him yesterday to drop him off. He’ll spend a few days in a cabin before heading off with a small group to Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
It a whirlwind start to the summer. The last day of school was Friday. Saturday he went to camp. When he returns, we’ll be living in a new house!
April Updates
Life was a whirlwind in April with spring break, the long-awaited start of in-person school for Griffin and Maggie, three birthdays (plus Piper’s), a cabin visit, and much that I’m forgetting. Lacking the time to write everything up in detail, here’s a selection of photos to remind us of these many events.
Bonus! Two videos.
Beetling Crags
A highly unusual event occurred last night while reading Treasure Island aloud with Griffin and Maggie. We came across this passage:
Among the fallen rocks the breakers spouted and bellowed; loud reverberations, heavy sprays flying and falling, succeeded one another from second to second; and I saw myself, if I ventured nearer, dashed to death upon the rough shore or spending my strength in vain to scale the beetling crags.
Like many other passages, there were some words here that the kids didn’t know, but I was also perplexed by the adjective, beetling. We guessed from the context that it might mean steep or slippery or only climbable by beetles. I pulled out my phone and looked it up on my trusty Merriam-Webster app:
The example sentence is the very sentence we had read! We were all quite astonished by the coincidence.
A Bit of Hope
As mentioned in prior posts, Oliver was in preschool this year for a few months at the beginning of the year. Now he is back at an outdoor preschool for three mornings a week.
Griffin and Maggie, however, have been in full distance-learning since last March. They’re used to it now, but it has been a major blow. A normal day in their Montessori school would involve 6-7 hours of constant interaction. Working with classmates, moving around the classroom, attending mini-lessons from the teacher, playing at recess, lunch, the school bus, etc.
Now they’ve got Zoom meetings, independent work, and an occasional minecraft game with their friends. I’m not knocking the school; they’re doing a great job. But the social gulf between this year and last is enormous.
It is with joy, therefore, that we dove into a program at their school where individual classes come to campus once-a-week for a few hours of all-outdoor social time. Maggie had her first day yesterday and Griffin went in this morning. (We only have a picture of Griffin at this point.) Hopefully this is the first step on the long road to normalcy.
