Do you have summer homeschool? We homeschool all year round and take breaks based on my husband’s work schedule. I do tend to take August off so I can plan and prepare the following school year’s curriculum as well. This past school year has been rough on us personally. Then you have how Coronavirus has effected all of our lives compounding that. So I think I may aim to get done earlier in July this year and take a bit longer break. I always struggle with the idea of too much time off though as my son functions best with the routine of homeschool life.
Here in Lighthouse Christian Academy, summer homeschool looks different than normal homeschooling. We drop some subjects after the curriculum is finished up and pick up others. I normally aim to have more fun in our summer schooling. This means we add in our major art program for the year. Yet we relax things like math a bit. We still do occasional math worksheets to keep our skills up, but don’t do a daily schedule anymore. The same goes for history, science, spelling, etc.
This year my son is interested in doing an insect and spider unit study. He has a lot of fear over creepy crawlies and he is hoping that it will help allay his fears a bit. He’s a bit of an anxious one sometimes over things he doesn’t understand so we aim to educate those areas. Knowledge is power!
Summer Curriculum
So this is what our summer subjects look like: art, arthropods, U.S. geography, handwriting, piano, reading and a Minecraft workbook. So I mentioned art and arthropods, but why did I choose the other subjects? Well the geography is a continuation of this year’s curriculum, Road Trip USA. I chose to do one state per week so obviously that will take more than one normal school year. I don’t want it to to take a full two years to get through, so we will continue it through the summer months.
Next my son needs the practice in handwriting! Oh does he ever! So we are going to be trying out some new handwriting techniques starting with our summer session. We have been doing Hoffman Academy for piano and will continue that as well. Piano is fun, but also needs to be practiced like any instrument so we will keep doing our normal piano schedule.
Finally I picked up this Minecraft workbook at Costco late last year. My son saw it and was excited about it so I told him we could use it for our summer session. My only regret is that we had to pick up the workbook for grades 1 & 2 (I believe they were out of the next book up) as this book will be super easy and not challenging whatsoever. But it’s summer right? It will be just some review and not learning anything new.
We’re obviously still going to be reading over the summer. Reading happens all year round regardless of school, but we’ll also have a specific book study we’re going to do over the summer. Island of the Blue Dolphins was on my reading list for next year. This happens to be one of Richard’s favorite books from childhood so I want to do it while he’s still working from home so that maybe he can join in on our discussions during his lunch break.
Conclusion
So there you have it. This is what our summer homeschool is going to look like this year. Do you do summer school? Why or why not? Our reasons are definitely due to routines being good for my child and to combat summer slide. You know that regression in skills that often happens when kids stop schooling over summer? And the reason why every year in public school it seems like you wasted the first 6-8 weeks of school going over the same information you learned last year? Yeah, I hated that.
Thanks for reading!
