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!
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.
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.
Anyone who has homeschooled for more than one hour knows that interruptions are part of the job description.
On my good days, I try and embrace the interruptions – the many opportunities for real life training and modeling grace and patience. I totally agree with the writer of this post who said, “Interruptions are not obstacles to our plan; they are opportunities for us to embrace God’s plan.” So true.
But some seasons bring so many interruptions – so much chaos – it just seems impossible to maintain any semblance of order or sanity, much less get any meaningful homeschooling done.
Over the past four years, we’ve renovated nearly our entire home, room by room. Home renovations are definitely one of those chaos-inflicting seasons – but there ARE things you can do to make it through.
We’ve tried a few different homeschooling schedules over the years but our favorite so far is 6 weeks on, 1 week off.
It’s not a new idea but it was new to me a few years ago and I’m absolutely loving it!
Whether you’re a Planning Patty or a Spontaneous Sally, everyone can benefit from a big-picture look at the school year ahead.
Many homeschooling families (and non-homeschooling families, too) are living on one income in a two-income economy.
Our own household income was cut by 50% when I quit my full-time architecture career to stay home with our first baby. We had some savings and made it work for the short-term but once we decided to homeschool we realized the “dip-into-savings-and-just-don’t-buy-stuff” approach wasn’t going to work for the long haul.
The loss of one full-time salary or the switch to part-time income with fewer benefits is a huge adjustment. In a culture obsessed with money and material possessions you’ll need to muster all your courage and intentionality to stick to a financial plan that works.
But I’m here to tell you it CAN be done!
If you haven’t done so yet, read the first post in this series here and check out Our Curriculum Choices – Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, and Year 4.
If you’ve been following this series of posts, we’ve now caught up to real time. I wrote about the first four years retroactively because I started this blog just before we began our fifth year of homeschooling.
Since I can’t summarize a year that hasn’t happened yet, this snapshot will be a look at how our year has started so far. Later this school year I hope to post about lessons learned during Year 5… but I have to learn them first, so stay tuned.
If you haven’t done so yet, read the first post in this series here, and check out Our Curriculum Choices – Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3.
While we were (and still are) far from having it all figured out, Year 4 was the first year I felt noticeably more confident in our homeschooling.
After several years of educating our kids at home, I now had some data to work with – some proof that this was working. We could look back on work from the years past and see tangible evidence that growth and learning were taking place. Phew!
If you haven’t done so yet, read the first post in this series here, and check out Our Curriculum Choices – Year 1 and Year 2.
Each year seems to bring something new, and our 3rd year educating our kids at home was no exception. It was the first time I was homeschooling with an infant. And we were still grieving the loss of my dear mother-in-law who had passed away only a few weeks after I had our third baby.
But God has always been our Provider, whether it’s in the form of new insights, tangible resources, or help from friends and family. He’s consistently given us hope and a way through difficult seasons, both in homeschooling and life in general.
