end of the year celebration

I love the cycles of teaching. Every year the year starts over with already familiar and also new faces. The year is intense, exhausting, joyful, inspiring, and everything in between. But then the end of the year comes and everything just seems to have come full circle.

Our school has the tradition for each student to receive a quality that he/she has practiced or demonstrated over the course of the year. All the teachers meet and together we choose the quality for each student. Courage, Awareness, Kindness, Friendship, Curiosity...

Each student reflects, researches and thinks about his/her quality and writes a speech. The progression that we see in the speeches from Kindergarten to 8th grade is amazing. They usually start with a couple sentence speeches like "I practice kindness when I play with my friends. I had a great year". By the time the child reaches Middle school there are longer, throughly thought out speeches.

At the end of the year celebration all the families come together to celebrate and each student comes up on stage to receive their quality and say their speech.

Sophia received the quality of "good energy" this year. Here she is giving her speech.

"To me good energy means choosing to be nice. I was given the quality good energy because sometimes I do not feel happy but choose to create good energy in myself."

Congratulations, Sophia and all Living Wisdom School Stars!