Thread: Weekly Poll: What does your summer look like?

So the answer to this question varies so much from homeschooling family to homeschooling family. BUT I thought that it might be fun to see what everyone else does for the summer months!

As for our family, we homeschool year round, so that we do not have those dreaded of all months in September and October of review! My oldest especially has done so much better just because of us keeping up some kind of schedule over the summer months. Now I don't want you to think that we do the same schedule as during the regular school year. The summer months for us contain math (mostly anything they had trouble with), spelling (cuz we are still working on improvement in that area since the beginning) and music lessons/practice. But then I try to add in the subjects that we didn't get to as much as I wanted to like history and science! I plan on finally getting through the Story of the World (yes we have done the same 20 chapters forever now) and this year I am adding more science to the mix. In the way of experiments, because my boys love to create cool experiments!

We do also take our days down to 4 days a week for the summer leaving us open to do some long weekend vacations OR long weekend projects. So in a nutshell that is what we do over the summer.... What about you?

Well, we work through the summer, but we also check out the programs offered by the Youth Center on base. There are often little summer camps, some fun and some academic. Last year, I let my son choose 2 or 3. We will see what they offer this year!

For this summer, very similar to what Wendy just said. We'll work through the summer, at least when the kids aren't in camp. They're each signed up for a couple. Also, we have some travel, but I think we'll probably school through most of it. After all, "school" is just a couple hours at most.

Right now, I'm planning to do a bigger break in the fall.

We will cut back to math and practicing our instruments.
In the past, we have continued to do a fun unit study or something that I felt like we needed to cover that hadn't been covered. For example, last year we did a unit study on World Religions to get ready for our unit on the holocaust this past year.
This year is a little different. We have a trip to Orlando for Gaufest. Then each of the kids has a sleep away camp they are going to (Joseph and Libby for one week and Caroline for two weeks). They are all doing a two week theater camp at the rec center (free!).
After we wrap up the units that we are working on, we will be hanging it up for summer (except for the above mentioned math and music).

Since we follow M2's school schedule, we mostly take summer off. That being said, M1 likes to review now and then so he doesn't have to do it when we go back in August.

Come summertime I need a break as much as the kids, so we hardly do anything. I have the kids practice piano everyday, and they have to read for thirty minutes. Other than that their summers are free and so are mine. By August I feel recharged and ready to go.

We just started a concept in MBtP, which will probably take us into early July. We'll stick with that unless there is something else to do, but around here there aren't many distractions. The weather is usually cold and wet all summer so it's hardly tempting to go outside, the couple of friends he has here are stuck in day care all day during the week and go out of town every weekend, and sports are just in the evenings so we may as well keep busy doing school work. We have a big trip coming up in the fall so we probably won't do much traveling over the summer, other than long weekends of camping.

My daughter wants to do "school work" pretty much every day of the week. She's 5 so after about 40 minutes she's done. We are going to take two weeks off and then start MBtP with her. My son wants to do a review of this year's math- so we've agreed on Math Mondays. We did minimal science this year and are going to have "Science Fridays" (yes we listen to way too much NPR,lol). There are so many kids in our neighborhood that show up at our house most days in the summer so I think we are going to make Science Fridays a group activity. We pulled out a lot of science activities last year and the kids all had fun with it. I think we might also start a foreign language this summer. Possibly German since we have relatives coming to visit us from Bavaria later this summer.

This is our first year so we plan on doing a few days (hours really) a week to finish up some work we planned on but haven't done yet. We're going away early in June and we'll probably bring a math worksheet or two to do and we'll start our next read-aloud book and probably brainstorm on what we'd like to do in the fall. I see us probably not doing much in August or September. Once the PS kids go back we're going to load up on field trips because we know once it snows we're stuck inside for the most part. Camping is on the agenda too as my brother has invited us to join his family a few weekends. They'll sleep in the luxury RV, we'll hunker down in our non-luxury tent (never liked my brother much - LOL).

DD has recently started horseback lessons and that will continue along with taking golf lessons with one of her friends and maybe if we can afford to fit something else in we'll see if we can find a workshop she'll enjoy. Our rec dept doesn't have anything that interest her - we've tried but each activity is so poorly managed she always hates them. Soccer starts in late August and that's her "thing".

Well, this will be our first summer of homeschooling, so we'll see if this plan actually works: the "three R's" a few times a week and keeping up (at least review, maybe new material if they ask) of the foreign languages they've started. No more than an hour a day, and I won't stress if we miss days because we have something fun planned. I don't want them to backslide or get too far out of a routine. I keep a nature journal in the summer and I'll write about things we see and have the kids help me "research" them.