I’d like to start this post with an apology for any neck injuries you may have sustained by following this series of posts. It’s been like watching a tennis match!
Back and forth I’ve gone, trying to find the sweet spot for our summers. More academic? More relaxed? Over-scheduled? Lazy days? Seems like we’ve tried it all.
We’ve finally caught up to real time in this series – we’ll be heading into our 5th official homeschool summer in less than a month!
If you’ve been following this series (if not, start here), you’ll probably have noticed a pattern by now. We seem to keep ping-ponging back and forth between work-focused summers and play-focused summers, always trying to find the sweet spot.
Year 3 was a summer of virtually no advanced planning and no academic work. So, you probably won’t be too surprised when I tell you that Year 4 was the complete opposite.
(And, according to my oldest son who was just reading over my shoulder a minute ago, Year 4’s summer was “horrible!” Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.)
In the last post, I promised you a summer on the other side of the continuum, so here it is! The summer of our mega home renovation! When all bets were off, plans were non-existent, and I was living way, way outside my Type-A, Planner-Person comfort zone.
You can see more about the renovation, including before and after pictures, in this post.
I didn’t try to plan a more relaxed summer. I didn’t decide that we needed less formal school-ish work. By the time I had my head far enough above water to think about our summer homeschool plans, it was already August.
In the last post, I described the summer break we had after our first official year of homeschooling. If you read it, you may recall that I said it was a “fun and balanced summer.”
“Fun and balanced” sounds pretty good to me – so why, I ask myself now, why-oh-why did I try and fix what wasn’t broken?
Looking back on Year 2 from a Year 5 perspective, I think it’s ultimately because I let the “you’re-not-doing-enough” worry-monster get to me.
I never know what to do with summer break.
Wait. Let me rephrase that.
I never know what to do for our homeschool during summer break.
If I ever had the luxury of my own summer break, I’d know exactly what to do with it (i.e. unlimited ice cream, a beach, and a stack of good books)!
But I digress.
When it comes to planning out what to do for my kids’ education over summer break, I perpetually bounce back and forth between two extremes.
In the last post, we took a look at ways to homeschool successfully even during a messy, unpredictable home renovation.
Here’s one last idea (the best one, in my opinion) for successfully homeschooling in the midst of a remodel project. Drum roll, please.
The idea is to…
Parents of kids with math phobias are in a tricky spot. They know their child needs extra help with math but the more they try and work on it, the more the anxiety builds. The more anxiety builds, the worse their kid performs at math! And the vicious cycle continues.
I don’t want to overstate things but… the LeapFrog Letter Factory DVD taught my kids to read!
Well, ok, maybe I overstated things.
But in all seriousness, I can’t think of any other single educational DVD that has been so effective or so requested in our household.
So far we’ve seen what’s worked and not worked of my original plan for this year. But there have also been some unexpected resources that have ended up being some of our new favorites!
As hard as it is for a planner like me to admit, sometimes embracing spontaneity is the best plan of all!
In the first post in this series, I focused on subjects that are going well. I do love it when a plan comes together!
But that was the easy part. Now we come to the part that can get discouraging really fast if we’re not careful…
