It's Summer!!!!! ...ish

All of the local public schools are out for the summer! YEAH! IT'S SUMMER BREAK!!!!!!

-ish!

For my kids, it is still time for school!

Okay, okay, so I know the idea of splashing around in water areas, playing with friends, and sleeping in sounds like fun, but the truth is that we tend to do things like that all year long anyway. We do not need a three month break, so although it is "summer" my kids still do lesson work. Because the boys and I are home full-time, there is always time for splashing, playing, and sleeping in- but there is also always time for schoolwork! **I speak on behalf of my family, NOT for all homeschool families. Many homeschool families do take summer breaks!!!!**

Breaks are very important, but I tend to make our school breaks happen when we need them, or schedule them around trips or visits. Breaks for us do not always mean that schoolwork stops. Our busiest and most complicated lesson plans are during the break we take during November/December. When I say we take a break during that time, I mean we are breaking away from our regular school routine and going into our holiday history and Advent lesson schedule. Those school days are much longer, take more prep, and are much more intensive than most of the rest of the year.So while it is a break, in a way, it is not schoolwork-free. We do have schoolwork-free breaks, but they are generally not in very large chunks.

Summer does bring a change for us! We do not do our traditional homeschool curriculum and rotation over the summer. I take the time to mix things up, relax things a bit, and often will use the summer to try new materials or methods. I feel like the change really makes summer special and sets it apart, without totally letting us go crazy or getting the boys out of the habit of doing schoolwork. (My first year homeschooling we started after taking the summer off- HUGE mistake. It works well in some families, but not for mine! My sons were resistant, angry, and had a really hard time adjusting back to the school routine- so we have never taken a summer off since and it has worked out much better for us.)

This summer we will be continuing our Language Arts lessons with Time4Learning.com.

We will be doing math from Math-U-See, and supplementing with the math lessons from Time4Learning.

I am going to be doing the summer program from Vocabulary Spelling City- we have not used the program before but the boys are excited about the idea of doing schoolwork on our tablet or phone. (This will be a test of the program. A friend of mine uses it and loves it, so I thought we would try it out, and they have a special program just for summer so I took the opportunity to sign up.)

We will be working on the kids' typing skills with games from here.

We will continue reading books from the library, our home collection, Kindle (so many free books- love love love!), Tumblebooks, and any other way we can grab them. We will be signing up for library Summer Reading Programs (but generally we finish those within a few weeks... so maybe we will make our own).

We will be doing more unit studies and less general study work. All social studies, science, additional language arts, writing, reading, etc will all be unit based. Carter and Harrison will continue writing in their 2012-2013 school year journals.

YAY SUMMER!!!!!!!!!

Let the fun begin!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, excuse me, I need to move over so Carter can work on his language arts. He is doing dictionary work, and needs access to the computer so he can search online dictionaries. (Back in my day, we had to use a book!) Then I think we will visit the library. Love summer!