Let’s talk a bit about summer school! We are not year-round schoolers, but we do arrange a bit of schoolwork into a light summer term each year.
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Our Morning Basket continues during the summer with some books we didn’t have a chance to get to during the school year. Here’s what’s on our shelf right now:
:: Poetry – The Golden Treasury of Poetry, A Small Child’s Book of Verse, A Child’s Book of Poems, The Jessie Wilcox Mother Goose (not pictured)
:: Religion – Leading the Little Ones to Mary (finishing up), The King of the Golden City (we have the oop edition put out by CHC, I believe — the one is the same but doesn’t have illustrations), the Bible (we like the Douay-Rheims)
:: Nature Study – The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, Botany in a Day, The Big Book of Animals Every Child Should Know
:: Folk Songs – The Battle of the Kegs
:: Stories – My Naughty Little Sister, The Big Alfie Out-of-Doors Storybook, Pinocchio, Kindergarten Gems (I’m aiming this read-aloud slot at my littles. We save the books aimed at the Big Kids for naptime and audiobooks in the car.)
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I also printed out a simple weekly checklist for my Big Kids. As usual, in addition to daily piano practice and chores, they spend a bit of time each day (about 30-45 minutes) working toward these weekly tasks:
:: Latin and Grammar. They do one exercise from Getting Started with Latin and one from Winston’s Grammar a week. (Gianna moved ahead in grammar and finished the next couple months of lessons, so she actually doesn’t have that on her list for summer.)
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Audiobooks + Legos. Almost every day at naptime, I start an audiobook and my oldest four play with Legos for a couple hours while I tend to the baby and listen in. If he ends up falling asleep too (not often but occasionally), I even get to lie down with a book! 🙂
Outings. I’m not a big outing person, so I choose when we leave the house pretty selectively. But based on my kids’ request, we’ve got going a weekly park day and a weekly nature study outing (both with friends) and a weekly trip to the beach (with Daddy).
Shakespeare. Since seeing The Winter’s Tale last month, the kids have been memorizing bits of scenes, casting parts, and thinking about how they would stage it all. I have a feeling there will be some performances here over the next couple months!
Writing stories. Gianna has two stories in the works: “Charity, the Duke’s Daughter” and “A Gift for George Washington.” She dutifully writes every day. 🙂
Handicrafts. They are still busy with origami (last year’s handicraft focus), and Gianna has been digging into Fun with Paper. Summer always means more opportunities for the girls to cook, and the boys have been busy with beeswax. Handicrafts is one of my weak points, so I usually take the summer to ease into something they can then continue into the coming year (with an eye toward handmade Christmas presents too). This summer, we’ll be doing some felting kits they got for Easter and I hope we’ll continue felting through school year. (Wish me luck because I don’t know what I’m doing! LOL)
And lots of drawing and reading, of course!
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:: And plan our coming school year, probably the most important task of all! I’ve got Years 5, 2, and 1 next year. Thankfully AmblesideOnline does most of the work for me, but I still have a lot of prep work ahead of me if I want our days to run on smooth rails this fall.
And if you’d like to see our plans from the past, here’s last year’s and the year before’s. (You’ll note they look very similar. :))
What are you up to this summer?
12 comments
So we're just about to start our last week of school and I just completely cribbed my summer weekly checklists based on this summer posts and the previous ones. Thanks for making things easy for me! 😀 And it was so fun taking a little trip down memory lane and reading our comments back and forth in the last two years too.
Your project list looks nice and ambitious, just like mine. 🙂 Besides the school planning, I'm also planning a desperately needed revamp of our schoolroom (I keep thinking about posting a pic on Instagram, but I'm not sure I want to admit I've allowed my children's desks to look like they do…), time at the lake and pool w/ family and friends, some gardening, some blogging projects, and hopefully some camping and backpacking too.
And I loved your discussion about your school year, especially the part about the feeling ahead! I've been doing the 6 weeks on, 1 off schedule for two years now and the one thing that gets me about it is feeling like I'm behind at this time of the year. So many people seem to end in May, and here we are, just finishing up on June 10th. It was actually supposed to be the 17th, but I figured out how to finagle the schedule a bit to get us done a week earlier. But I am looking forward to having all of July off and not starting until mid-August… there's pluses and minuses no matter what!
I love this Summer overview. I really relate to your way of teaching and household management. I have 4 kids under 5. Could you share some tips on meal prep/planning/expectations? When do you fit it in (what time of the day?). Do you serve healthy foods or easy prep? How do your kids help? And most importantly when do you find time to clean up lol? I find I avoid housework because I would rather nurse the baby, read books, go for walks… :). I've seen your blank chart with meal brainstorming with the kids, but I was looking for more specific advice. (P.S. I love your nap time school and morning basket and plan to do it this year!)
And how do you use charter funds for a Charlotte Mason curriculum? Do you go through an online one like Connecting Waters or use a charter that is classical by nature?
I am about 1/2 school year behind you. Would you be willing to include a copy of your summer checklist? That visual would be so helpful as I go into OUR summer planning mode. Thanks!
Haha — glad to be of service! 😉 And since you said that about our past comments, I had to read through them too. Fun to see that we're still chatting about the same kinds of things two years later! 🙂
I can't wait to see your schoolroom — if not the "before," then at least post-revamp. We don't have a schoolroom, which is good in that when you're schooling in your dining room, you can't let it get out of control! And bad for the same reason. 🙂
Sabbath schooling has always intrigued me because I think it seems such a steady scheduling approach, but I am a plow-on-through kind of person and enjoy taking my break in a big chunk. (Which means that maybe I *should* try it, now that I think about it, just to slow me down! ;)) But I can imagine something working like that for us later, when I'm juggling even more students and need the more frequent breaks.
Congrats on (almost) finishing your school year!
First, when do I find the time to clean up: my kids honestly do a HUGE chunk of the housework. They each do two chores a day plus help with laundry and dining chores. Add that up with three Big Kids, and that's a lot of stuff getting done on a daily basis. (And in addition, I give out chores for punishments. ;)) I have one main task per day on my list, so that's easy enough to get to while the kids are playing outside in the mornings. Other than that, I'm responsible for dinner, baby care, schooling, and making sure everyone stays happy and healthy. So the housework is not at all overwhelming for me at this point. When I had four kids under four (!), housework was a MUCH more difficult situation than it is now with so many helpers. 🙂 So hang on just a couple years while training those kids in good cleaning habits and you'll have quite a bit of it off your plate! 🙂
Meal planning: I plan by week on Sundays, usually, since I most often do my grocery shopping on Mondays. We have about three simple meals that we rotate through for breakfasts and lunches right now, and those the Big Kids can make and serve. (Super easy.) I'd like to up my game in that area — I used to make fancier breakfasts. But now is not the time! 🙂 Everyone is happy this way for now, and I'm able to school my middles while I'm wrangling my baby in the mornings while the older two handle breakfast prep. It's a load-off for my schedule.
As for healthy or easy prep, I like to think both! 🙂 I don't subscribe to any particular styles or trends in cooking, so we don't eat high-protein or paleo or anything like that, but I also don't do a lot of convenience/processed foods. My method for doing simple scratch cooking is to keep a fairly small rotation of menu items, do some freezer or batch cooking, and include meals that can be prepped in the early afternoon while the little kids are at nap or eating lunch. Menu items that keep me at the stovetop stirring for the half hour before dinner don't work well here except on the weekends. So I do soups, pastas, meats and vegetables with rice… Cooking mostly from scratch, but not ya know, rolling my own pasta dough with almond flour or anything. LOL My husband makes dinner once on the weekend usually (breakfast for dinner, his specialty ;)), so that gives me a day off. And on beach days, I plan leftovers or have a couple frozen pizzas on hand. That reminds me: we do have leftovers once a week usually. One of the days I plan a big batch of something that can last two days — either the main dish or the sides. So that's another "easy" day for me.
Okay, that was scattered. 🙂 Let me know if you have other questions!
Our charter is a parent-choice charter, not online but all homeschoolers. So we are free to use the curriculum and the methods we want. I don't purchase much of our CM materials through the charter — I mostly use the funds for piano, art, and swim lessons as well as regular school supplies (notebooks, pencils, printer cartridges, etc) and quality art and handicraft supplies.
Sure — email me at joyouslessons AT gmail DOT com and I'll send you a pic. 🙂
Thanks for sharing all of this with us. It's so great to see what other families do during the summers.
Thank you, that was so helpful!!! It's so good to hear that it can be ok to rotate through a few/easier kid friendly meals. I do need to spend more time on prep. My mom used to do that too and I've just fallen out of the habit. And great point to train the kids in housework. That's actually one of my summer goals. Thank you again for being so thorough… I plan to come back to this post and re-read. 🙂
Did you end up making a lesson plan to go along with the Law book? Just got it and LOVE it, but unsure how to work it into our school in a systematic way….feeling like it would be a great thing to start in our summer morning time! Would love any tips/plans you have!
Hi Chelsea! We have been using the activities he lists out in the first half of the book on and off for the last couple years with great success! But I don't have them in any format to share, I am sorry! I have meant to do that but just haven't had the time. But short answer: I choose a "challenge" for the week based on his activity titles — like Zoom In, Zoom Out, Record a Nature Event, etc. I read through the section, and then share the ideas and the examples he has there with the kids. Then we do it for our nature journal entry that week. We usually choose based on what specimens will be available, what the weather will be like, where we'll be meeting, etc. It hasn't been super formal but it has added some nice variety to our journaling time and improved our ability to engage, observe, and narrate! 🙂