{{In case you are wondering… YES! They are all this excited about summer school! ;)}}
As a kid I remember always looking forward to Summer because it meant no more homework and no more teachers! It meant playing all day long with friends from sun up to sun down, ice cream trucks and popsicles, mud pies and bike rides.
By the time school would start again in the fall I had forgotten so much! I distinctly remember one particular incident where I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to do a subtraction problem where the top number was smaller than the bottom number. If I remember correctly, it was the beginning of second grade. We had learned, the year before, how to borrow from the neighbor to the left but… I hadn’t borrowed from a neighbor for nearly 3 months!
I sat on the couch with my first homework assignment of the year (math) and I remember laughing out loud when the question was 35 – 8 = …
Because 5 – 8 = 0… THREE TIMES!!
How was that even possible? I laughed as I walked my homework over to my mom who reminded me to ‘borrow’.
Good times, good times.
My kids aren’t so lucky. They don’t take an entire 3 month hiatus. We school year round because we take breaks whenever we feel a burn out coming on. Sometimes one kid is breaking while the others are still chugging along. Or we break on some subjects but not others. That’s the beauty of homeschooling!
This summer is going to be so much fun! I had a friend in my ward call up and ask if we would be interested in forming a small group of kids for a book club.
HECK YEAH!!
Three of us and our kids met up to discuss the details and set it all up. We decided ages 8-12 would be perfect! However, there is another mom that has a 6 year old that wanted to do it as well, and one of the moms at the meeting also has a 6 year old so it was decided that we could do two separate book clubs. The two little ones along with H because even though H will be eight next month, she is still not quite ready for the bigger books on the docket for the older kids.
A schedule was made with a list of all activities planned. Two moms are in charge of the activities each Thursday throughout the summer (the moms that don’t have little ones at home) while myself and another mom are in charge of the book clubs on Tuesdays each week. We will rotate having the little ones and the older ones.
My kids are excited to be doing this with some of their friends and I am excited that we have a plan! Mind you, these other families do not homeschool. They do, however, have a vested interest in their children’s educations. I look at all of these families and think, they would make AWESOME homeschoolers! But I realize that it’s not for everyone. And in their own way, they ARE homeschooling! I love that they have a plan for summer as well!
In case you are interested here is a list of the activities planned.
- June 13 – Make bread
- June 20 – Picnic at the lake
- June 27 – Learn about and make kites
- July 4 – No activity planned
- July 11 – Fly kites at The Great Salt Lake
- July 18 – Learn about indexing
- July 25 – take Trax downtown
- August 1 – Make baby burritos (not sure what that is)
- August 8 – Family History Class
- August 15 – Go on a hike
As for the book club, here is a list of the books we plan to read and discuss over the summer for the big kids.
- June 11 – Bring your favorite book (novel) to tell the others about.
- June 18 – The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
- June 25 – The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
- July 2 – Bring your favorite childhood picture book to discuss
- July 9 – Choose a Childhood of Famous Americans book to read and discuss. Dress as that person.
- July 16 – SOS Titanic by Eve Bunting
- July 23 – The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo and Yoko Tanaka
- July 30 – Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
- August 6 – The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- August 13 – Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan
Obviously, this is just a guideline. We have a total of six kids in the older group. Some of them are not readers. They just don’t like it. This is the case for the mom’s son who approached us about this group idea. She just wants him to start reading and enjoy it. And then there are the 8 and 9 year olds in the group. They aren’t going to read as quickly as K or her friend who are both bookworms and could read Harry Potter within a couple of days.
If we start to see that things are just going way too quickly for some, we will simply slow it down. Discuss one book for two weeks if we have to. That might mean that we aren’t able to get through them all and that’s ok.
For the younger group we are simply going to read and discuss a picture book each week, one with a message. Or a short chapter book that moms can read to them during the week without losing their attention.
What about you? Do you school your kids during the summer months? Are your kids in year-round school? What do you have planned?
3 comments:
We are doing an hour a day of learning, and then we have something fun planned for each day. I wish I lived by people like you that would want to do this. It seems like people are so busy these days that they don't really care about summer learning. {I won't go on, because that is a big soap box that I could spend an hour writing about :)
We also school-year round. Since we live in Florida ( So Hot here!), I thought it was better to take our breaks though out the year, when the weather is more tolerable. Plus, I like being able to take time outs when I feel we need them :)
As far as what we are doing. Well, we plan on continuing on with what we have been doing all year. We use an Online Curriculum (Time4Learning). The only thing that has changed is our weekly Co-op that has ended for the Summer; which we are all sad about. I really wish I could find something, like what you are doing, in my area. Unfortunately, most of the homeschooler's I know, tend to stick to a traditional school year.
Looks like you guys are going to have a fabulous summer! We haven't done anything formal in about 6 weeks since I just had a baby 3 weeks ago. We are adjusting to our new family but there is plenty of natural learning happening!
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