October 8, 2009

Explaining Granite Bridge

We have been formally home educating our children for a long while. We had dabbled with it when Alec was in the 2nd grade (keep in mind he is now in his first year of college!). But jumped in with both feet when Jess was ready to start formal schooling - (read when the town said she was ready for first grade at age 5 because we were dumb enough to ask them to test her)!
Anyway - this school year is our EIGHTH year of home schooling! Wow time flies!

Granite Bridge Academy is born:
Back quite a few years ago, I had the brilliant idea of officially naming our home school. I wanted to have a name to put on report cards, high school transcripts and diplomas when the time came. I also had seen it a few places on the web where people had smart or interesting names for their home schools to answer critics about whether home education could possibly be 'real' school. Now to be honest, a name doesn't mean much in the scope of anything. But I liked the idea nonetheless.

So I set about coming up with something clever, or so I thought. Lots of families just use their last name but that didn't curl my toes. There were several out there with a faith based theme, which I really liked, since we do this because we truly believe God wants us to do this. However I didn't have any inspiration around that type of name either. One day I was driving along and saw a sign someplace and it hit me! Not the sign, but a name. We live in NH, which is the "Granite State" and how do we get to the future except by traveling a path and often over a bridge when adversity (or a river) gets in our way. So thus... Granite Bridge Academy was born.
I felt so pleased with myself and my husband very lovingly gave me his standard "yes dear, whatever you like dear" when I shared my excitement about our school name. He even let me order an embosser with our new name on it. When it arrived I promptly and proudly embossed all the covers of every workbook the kids had for the year!
It hasn't really changed anything, but I like our school name. It feels right for our family. We are truly striving to give our children a rock solid foundation through their faith in Christ and our educational efforts with them.


When Alec applied to college, I liked having a school name at the top of his transcript. And when we gave him his diploma - it looked pretty snazzy there too.

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