As the world approaches summer and most people are getting out of school, it seems we are doing the opposite: we are just getting IN to school.
There are many different ways homeschooling families do summer. Some do a full summer like traditional schools. Some do a reduced or revised school program. And some truck on throughout the year.
Our spring has been a blur. After my bout with morning sickness that laid me up on the couch for the better part of January and February followed by family visiting and spring break in March then preparing, packing and moving house in April and May…the Spring is gone. And school, unfortunately, didn’t happen as I would have liked.
We did not do a very good job at keeping up with our daily school tasks as we did in the fall though, somehow, the girls actually did do work and have learned quite a lot! Honeybun has gotten over her subtraction borrowing stumbling block and Sugarplum is reading better than I could have ever imagined her to be a year from now!
But while they’ve managed to do their work, I have failed miserably at doing my end. Honeybun has gotten out of the habit of bringing her work to me to check and Sugarplum has gotten into the habit of thinking she doesn’t have to do anything at all.
A few weeks ago, I tried implementing a “breakfast to lunch” school schedule but it only worked moderately well because I would do my work on the blog at the same time thinking “this is working time for all of us” but it left the girls unattended with school and things just didn’t get done (like spelling, oy!)
I’ve been thinking about how summer would go for us for a few months now and even before we completely lost track of the spring, I’d decided to keep up our schedule through the summer. For one, we don’t do six hour school days so a few hours a day won’t hurt anyone. And secondly, our world is going to be turned upside down around the time everyone else goes back to school when baby #4 arrives and while I plan to keep up with school, I have to be realistic and assume that things could get off track again and we will basically take our summer then!
So yesterday we started again. New home, new start, new schedule! I decided to adjust our school “hours” to be lunch to nap time instead of breakfast to lunch as we have generally been doing since the fall. This is for a few reasons but mostly because the mornings at our new place are gorgeous and the whole point of moving was to get a yard for the kids to run around in! By lunch time it’s insanely hot and sunny in our backyard plus we are entering the rainy season in South Florida so afternoons are not always the best for being outside.
So by changing our school work time, the kids can play outside when it’s nice and I can do my blog work when I’m fresh and motivated. Then we can all sit down together to do school. I can sit with them and (hopefully!) do a better job of tracking and monitoring their progress, provide them with more varied materials like I did in the Fall and just be a better mommy teacher!
I also created a sign to remind all of us of the expectations for school. It shows our school “hours” and the expectations of what the girls are to achieve each day during our school time. I have high hopes that we can make it work this time!
