The Wood Family: Our Big, Exciting Weekend!

The excitement began on Friday morning. Caity was a participant in the school's Patriotic Speech Contest. All 6th graders at our school are required to write a speech on a patriotic theme. They then give their speech in front of their class. The two 6th grade Language Arts teachers then got together to decide which 6th graders would compete in the school contest. There were 14 6th graders chosen. They had to give a speech that was at least 2 minutes long. Caity walked up to deliver her speech without any notecards! She had worked hard to memorize the entire speech. She was extremely confident and poised and made eye contact with everyone in the audience. When she was finished an older gentleman sitting next to me nudged me and said, "Can you believe that little girl...she just did that whole thing without one single notecard!" It was pretty impressive. The winners were announced beginning with the 5th place finisher. When they got to third place and Caity's name still had not been called, her proud Papa turned around and said, "she won the whole thing!" Sure enough, our Caity is the school champion for the speech contest. On May 5th, she will compete in the district competition at the district office!

The next morning we were off to our first dance competition of the season. The girls both performed with their dance team in "Fame," and they each competed a solo. This would be Caity's first season competing a solo and she was very nervous! The team did great placing 7th overall in the junior division. Both girls did amazing jobs on their solo performances. They are what their dad likes to call "gamers!" Caity finished 7th out of 24 girls in her category. Not bad for her first try! Lindsey was in a more difficult category since this is her second year competing a solo. She won her age division and came close to making the top 10 out of all the soloists in her category! They are now working hard for their next competition in April. The next one will be the whole weekend and they will take classes from master teachers too. It should be fun!