It's almost summer, and for most students, that means a break in school work. Some homeschoolers go year round, though, and this year we're joining their ranks. Honestly, my son is not enthused about the idea. We've always done some math and reading in the summer along with our adventure boxes, but this will be the first summer we've been more formal about it. To take some of the sting out of the idea of summer school, I'm trying to come up with some ways to make it a little more fun, so I thought I'd share some of my plans with you!
Geography Adventure Box: This summer we're going to focus on geography–partly because we took longer than I meant to on Oklahoma history this year and never got to US Geography and partly because this was one of the suggestions my son made for last year's adventure box (when we ended up doing mythology instead). Even though I don't expect my daughter to retain everything I want my son to learn, this should be a good introduction to geography for her, too.
Games: Math was the first subject we ever carried through the summer because we didn't want our son to lose ground on the skills he had worked so hard to master. We'll be continuing on with our normal math curriculum, but I'm also planning on using games to review and reinforce math skills. We'll also use games to review concepts and skills from other content areas.
Reading: I shared our summer reading plans with you a couple of weeks ago and I am getting excited about starting some of these books! Best of all, as my son has been seeing me with the books, he is getting curious about them, too!
Projects: This summer both kids are going to be working on some special projects I think they'll enjoy. My daughter got a little sewing machine for Christmas and has been wanting to tackle some more projects, but with all of our outside activities it has been hard to find larger blocks of time to work on things like this during the school year. I found several books of simple projects for beginning sewers and we'll work on this throughout the summer. My son really wants to learn how to make videos, so we found him a stop motion animation kit I think he's going to really enjoy. Sometimes kids can learn a lot of different skills just by "working" on projects that interest them!
I know that with these plans and VBS, zoo camp, swimming, movies, and outside time, summer is going to fly by! I am ready for the fun to begin!