One of the best things about homeschooling is the ability to schedule your life without being tied to a school calendar. So, in that sense, ANYTIME can be the “perfect time” for your homeschooling family’s vacation, depending on your needs and goals.
But, I’ve found there’s a vacation sweet spot that has worked out best for us and that time is…
”Do you ask a fish how it swims? Or a bird how it flies? No sirree, you don’t! They do it because they were born to do it!”
– Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Just like Willy Wonka was born to invent new candy bars, kids were born to learn!
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about why homeschooling works easily for kids of all ages. They’re even learning on sick days. And, on our recent trip to the lake, I was reminded (yet again) how kids are always learning – even on vacation!
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.