Summer School!

Link

Usually by the end of the school year, by which I mean May, we are D.O.N.E. with anything even vaguely educational.  I certainly don't mean we are actually actually done the work I'd scheduled for us to finish that school year, but we just have no more brain space for one more lesson, one more fact, one more anything. 

So, because we homeschool, we just sorta...stop.  At some point I throw my hands up in the air and from that point forward whenever someone asks how 'school' is going, I laugh and explain that...it isn't.  Going, that is.  It isn't going and hasn't been going for a while now.

So this is all fine and well for us and the children.  May is half-hearted schooling, then June is totally void of anything intentionally educational at all and is usually filled with travel to see family and go to meetings.  But then here is the part where May come back to bite me.  Because after June comes July.  And July has two things against it.

1)  July is very hot.  And we are not a hot weather people.  No we are not.
2)  The children have exhausted the exciting novelty of 'vacation'.  And they are bored.

Here we are halfway through July and I know what the solution is, and it is restarting school.  So today, with a chorus of groans accompanying me, I pulled out a few small things to do, to start to ease back into school.  We had a family book study that was still unfinished, and so we heard a short chapter of that and then everyone did truly awful narrations.  And then we heard three short history chapters and looked at the map to discuss where all of these places were.  Where was Charlemagne coming from?  King Alfred and the Danes?  Who are these people?  Where were the Danes?

Of course, learning happens without books, obviously, and we do plenty of 'learningish' things all the time as a matter of course.  We've been playing math games and raising plants and monarch caterpillars, and we've been reading lots of books and finally finished a huge 1500 piece Van Gogh puzzle.  We've gone on trips and done woodworking and researched lots of things we're interested in.  We've heard plenty of audio books and new music and seen educational shows and gone exploring and swimming and so forth.  But those things are life for us, and when I refer to 'school' I mean more intentional learning.

So here is the plan for the remainder of July - slowly, slowly, finishing up the things we didn't quite finish last year.  And then hopefully August I can use as Review Month, because I'm sensing that will be very much necessary.  In September, with six weeks of reintroduction under our belts, we will be ready to launch into a new school year's work.

Of course, this is The Plan.  And who knows what the reality will end up being.