Today was the last day of school for me in elementary school since I just graduated from grade 8, and next year I’ll be in high school. Last Tuesday we had our graduation ceremony, so I’ll mostly be writing about that this week.
For the past week, the whole graduating class has been preparing for graduation in various ways. We first started off by electing our valedictorian a while before. The people that wanted to be valedictorian for our class admitted themselves and prepared a short speech to persuade people to vote for them. Our valedictorian was elected by student votes, and after each candidate read their speech; everyone voted for who they want the valedictorian to be.
Then we made the graduation video that was shown at the actual graduation ceremony. We all split into groups of around ten or so, and together we made short 30 second videos that tried to reflect on some of the memories we had at the school. Then after that, one of our teachers took all of our videos and put them together with some other pictures from our Blue Mountain graduation trip. There actually wasn’t a lot of time for us to work on those videos because there were quite a few other school events going on at the time, so we only had a few days to work on them.
After the video, we rehearsed the actual ceremony in order to make sure that we knew where to stand, sit, and go during the whole thing. We practiced a few times before with everyone, and it was pretty simple.
On the day of the ceremony, there was a bunch of people’s parents and relatives. Everyone just followed what we did in rehearsal and did what we were told to do, and everything went pretty smoothly. The only thing that was kind of strange was that we didn’t know who won all the different types of rewards. If you won an award that required you to go up on the stage and you were sitting in the middle of a row of seats; you’d have to walk over some people to get to the stage. I guess they wanted to keep everything a surprise, but I think they could’ve organized it a bit better.
Once the ceremony was over we all got to take pictures until the graduating class got to go eat dinner in a separate room. The dinner wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t say it was anything really special. It was more like a buffet type meal with a smaller selection of food items.
When you finished dinner you were able to dance on this really tiny dance floor, but most of my friends and I didn’t really go over there too much. We mostly stayed around our table talking and playing games for the most part. By the end, some people were crying on the way out even though we still had school for the next two days which didn’t really make sense to me since you’d see everyone tomorrow.
Overall, I had fun at graduation, and I even won some awards. It was pretty cool to see who won different the different types of awards, and I think our valedictorian’s speech was quite good as well. I’m not particularly excited for high school, but I don’t really mind. I have heard from some people that it’s a lot harder though.