Honeybun has had a bit of a disappointing time in life lately. First we moved her a whole half hour away from her friends. Then we planned a really awesome trip this summer that she doesn’t want to go on. And now I’m making her do school during the summer.
In reality, it’s not bad at all. Our new home and neighborhood are awesome (plus, did I mention we’re only 30 minutes away?) She is going to love the trip we are taking. And ok, school all summer does a little bit suck but I’m trying to make the most of it for the girls.
We’ve never been big library goers because previously our closest library was about 15 minutes away and not really near anything else we frequented so if/when we did go take books out (like for Honeybun’s pilgrim book, just before Doodle threw up all over a house we were viewing), I was horrible at getting them back on time because we were just never near a library! But our new house is less than 5 minutes from two libraries, one of which is on hubby’s way to work so I’m excited to get in there with the kids and start exploring.
When I told the girls we could go to the library more they were excited and Honeybun immediately thought of her research assignments and how the library would be good for that. Then I came up with the idea of learning about a different European country each week this summer.
The idea is important to me and our family for many reasons. Firstly because the girls don’t remember all the traveling we did around Europe when they were so small and I want them to stay connected to those memories. Also because they are a hodge-podge of European descent from hubby’s super Finnish side to my tiny little pie pieces of English going back to colonial times. I want them to know their ancestry and history. But it will be great for us this summer as well because that big trip we are taking is back to Dublin and what better way to learn about a place than to go there?!?!
So this week begins our European Learning Adventure in which we will plan out the rest of our summer, assigning weeks and doing some pre-research and planning lessons and adventures.
Obviously a lot of the summer is going to be geography based, looking at maps and learning about the “lay of the land” and that is where we will start, with a map of Europe as we plan which country we’ll take on each week.
