I am still planning the upcoming semester, so this will probably be brief. Or maybe not. I don’t exactly specialize in being brief. Either way, I find the anticipation building as I wait for our lovely brown paper packages to arrive via UPS.
To Year-Round School or Not to Year-Round School
I always thought we would be a year-round school. But we really aren’t. However, I can’t say we’ve really taken the summer off, either. However, I am learning that there is something special about each season, and just like there is always room for Thanksgiving and Christmas in our curriculum, so there will always be room for long hours in the hot summer sun.
This summer, we skipped math altogether, unless you count the fact that E. has learned to do a bit of it in his head and can tell you that it will be two years until he is seven when you ask him. We did phonics and reading practice, but not every day. We read aloud almost every day and we read some great books. We added some new chores to our lists. We did a handwriting worksheet every weekday.
In one respect, it seems there was lots of school. In another, it seems like there was at least an extra hour every day spent in the sun playing with the water hose and eating homemade popsicles. There was the weekly trek to Gran’s house where E. improved his swimming and A. revealed she is all too daring around water. We planted a garden, and later we harvested. We learned we are very bad at growing watermelon, but zucchini is a great boost for the farming ego.
New Tools
But the summer season is coming to an end, and I feel that we are all ready for more structure. I needed the break as much as anybody {though I can’t say, in retrospect, that it was really a break}. I have discovered some new tools, and I am also in the process of creating some new tools. My favorite discovery {thanks, Cindy!}, which I will use more and more as the years pass and we Grow Up, is the free Homeschool Tracker software. I plan to practice using it this year so that I can use it to organize my legal records when we are an official private school.
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