A Victorian Christmas

It has been a crazy week around here! On Friday night, our homeschool co-op celebrated the end of the semester with "A Victorian Christmas". We plan our theme around whatever historical era we happen to be studying at the moment, so this semester was the late nineteenth/early 20th century. Above are three fine-looking Victorian lads, Philip, their buddy Andrew and Benjamin. The whole family dresses up for the event (which is quite the ordeal when you are dressing seven), we share a meal together (in this case, a Victorian-style four course dinner), and the kids have a chance to show off what they've learned during the semester.

Becca and Philip's class performed the American Girls play about Samantha (Becca was GrandMary and Philip was a very convincing Eddie Ryland, the bratty kid-next-door); the Latin classes recited a prayer and sang Veni, Veni Emmanuel (O Come, O Come Emmanuel); the poetry class recited Robert Louis Stevenson and Edna St. Vincent Millay as well as some original poetry; Philip recited Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade; and John Mark's class did a Reader's Theater production of The Christmas Truce, a story about WWI. We wrapped the evening up with twenty-first century technology as the Pre-K/K class presented a very funny video they created over the semester about "Safety" and the Jr. High/High School class presented the projects they had created in the Powerpoint Presentations class.

Every semester, we moms look at each other and wonder Why are we doing this to ourselves? Yes, we are all slightly crazy, but of course the real answer is we're making memories. And they are good ones.