Ah, summer. Beautiful weather, long days at the pool (or the beach if you’re lucky!), and long sunny days filled with relaxation and restoration after a long school year. Well, it is for about five minutes, until the kids either start whining that they are bored or start fighting. Then what? I understand why some people completely take the summer off. They just need the break to unwind and step back from it all. I get that. Completely. We’ve even had a few summers when we had to do that. But personally, typically we home school straight through the summer for several reasons. I’ve worked really hard to create a learning environment in our home and prefer to keep it alive. I have found that a little bit of schoolwork in the morning fosters creativity all day. And finally, it’s a chance to study things that don’t fit into our school year curriculum.
I’ve worked really hard to create a positive learning environment in our home. There are maps and memory work everywhere. We have a habit of stopping to point out “CC Sightings” which is what we call anything that connects to what we’ve studied all year. We read a lot. My goal has been to make learning a natural, normal, positive part of life. If learning has a start date and an end point, what does that tell our kids? It tells them that learning is a chore to get through until we finally earn a break. How can we raise lifelong learners when we are counting the days until school is over because it’s a burden? That’s a negative mindset to teach our kiddos! Now, in our state we do have to keep records that we did school for 180 days. But when those 180 days are over, we do not pack it up and quit. We do lighten the load. We mostly do our morning basket together, read (and read and read), and do math. We don’t write papers and we don’t tackle huge projects. But you better believe we squeeze in a math lesson before we hit the pool! I believe that doing this teaches my kids that life is all about learning and we don’t ever take a break from that. When we stop learning, we stop growing. There is always something new to learn, no matter what time of year it is.
One of the summers that I decided to call it quits was fairly early in our home school journey. The kids were thrilled to have a break from lessons… for about three days. Then they were bored. They were whiny. They were miserable. After a couple weeks, I had enough. I sat them down and we read a chapter of Story of the World. Do you know what happened? They went in the playroom and built a puppet theater out of cardboard and made popsicle stick puppets and acted out the chapter I had read to them. Seriously. And it was this light bulb moment for me because I realized that just giving them a little bit of new “stuff” in the morning for their brains to feed on gave them inspiration for creativity throughout the day. Kids need time to be bored, for sure. But if we aren’t filling them with good stuff first, how can they be creative? We can’t expect quality output when there was zero input. Charlotte Mason says it best with these two quotes:
Finally, it’s a chance to study things we don’t have time for during the school year. Yes, with preschoolers, there is always time to spend a day learning how to make play dough or what ingredients go in cookies. But when the kids start growing up and have a lot more responsibility and curriculum to work through, there is not always time for the especially FUN stuff. Summer is a great time for a family unit study. This summer we’ve been reading lots of books on Niagara Falls, Canada, and waterfalls in general as we prepare for our summer vacation. My seventh grader would not really have had time to sit down and do that with us on a typical school day while Classical Conversations was still meeting. She’s got Latin exercises to work on and persuasive essays to write! Summer is a good time to come together and do fun projects together. It’s also a great time for us to all reconnect because my oldest is free from her typically workload and has time to enjoy things at a slow pace with the rest of us.
Now, don’t worry about my kids. They are not being deprived of summer. They get to the pool nearly every day. Between the two oldest kids, they are going to five different summer camps plus going on a family vacation. Trust me, they are still having summer fun! But on the days when we are home? We do break out the math books and knock out a lesson or two, read for awhile, and do some family learning. Our family is happier and more peaceful that way and that’s what matters.
Do you do school all summer? Share your thoughts in the comments!
