May is drawing to a close soon and with standardized testing last week we have officially finished our school year. Hooray! We actually homeschool year round with summer learning being different than the traditional school year months. My children are officially are in their ‘new’ grades. So what grades do I have for the 2015-2016 school year?
- 9th grade (High school – yay! It keeps getting better every year!)
- 5th grade
- 4th grade
- 2nd grade
- 1st grade
- TWO preschoolers (age 3 and 4)
- one Toddler (turning 2 this summer)
- and we’ll be joined by a new baby this fall!
This season of life is amazing, overwhelming, and so much fun! I love where I am at mothering my houseful. They are such individuals with their own personalities, talents, and interests. I learn so much from them.
I have been hashing out our summer learning plans because TODAY is our first day of summer. We use the summer months for a relaxed learning time built around simple goals. For example each day I will work with Oliver on learning to read. He’s using All About Reading and we just keep plugging along making slow but steady progress. Several of my children will use the summer for daily math fact practice so I’ve been gathering resources for that to provide variety. One child is probably using Life of Fred this summer for math instead at her request. Our family will have a history focus this summer, continuing our History Revealed curriculum several days per week. Everyone will read for 30 minutes a day. We will continue our book club read alouds.
There are some special plans as well for summer learning. We’ll be having Cooking School and each child will learn new skills in the kitchen and master new recipes. We will spend a lot of time outside playing and doing nature study. We will have lazy days and time for crafting and creating with Legos.
What will be different?
During the summer we’ll change up chores. For the last 8 months or so we’ve had a chore system that allows children to do chores voluntarily for pay. It has been an interesting experiment and opportunity for children to learn to handle money and the realities of “if you don’t work you’re tough out of luck”. During this time any child could choose from the available chores and payday came every two weeks for those who had worked. There have been weeks where all the children worked for some pay, weeks where one or two children did a lot of work and made money while the others didn’t, and even some times when none of the children worked and Mom and Dad had to pick up the slack (but didn’t have to pay anybody!). They have started to grasp the wonderful concepts of work, saving, and how your choices matter.
For the summer we will return to assigned chores for each child and there will be different money making opportunities (like yard work, gardening, or jobs I don’t want to do and am willing to pay someone else to do). Kids will also be allowed to pay their siblings to do their chores, which means if someone has money saved from working they can choose to pay a sibling to do one of their jobs on any given day or week. Why? Because that’s the way it works in real life! You earn money, save money, and can choose to pay someone else to do a job you don’t want to do – IF you’ve got enough money.
Another change for the summer – we’ll implement some different screen time rules. Well, one rule, really. No screens until after Quiet Time (2:30pm). We’re not changing our game playing rule (only 30 minutes per child once a week – our chosen day is Saturday). Why the summer rule? Because we want kids to be creative and when their morning is mostly free it’s all too easy to get sucked into watching tv. Outside time will be encouraged, as will making messes in creative pursuits.
