Summer's coming! Now what?

The warmer weather is here, finally! This has seemed like a very long, slow process to me, but summer is right around the corner.

Now what??

Some families do school year-round, some take the full summer off, and others, somewhere in between.

We have actually done all those things in different years. Each has advantages but "real life" certainly affects what we might choose.

Initially, we did 2-3 days worth of school over each week in the summer. It wasn't an arduous schedule, but allowed us to rack up some time toward our annual goal of hours or days. My kids didn't mind starting before their public school friends, but they had a passion to finish the school year before them!

Over the years we did 4-H, we tended to do less school in the summer. Time is short and precious when you are doing livestock projects! That is of course, an education in itself, and requires some flexibility during the year. We took shorter holiday breaks to give us time to take off for lambing in February, for instance.

Summer can be a great time to do Science. You can do some or even all, of your Science for the year over summer. We like to do some Math at least, which means we don't have as much review time needed as we start up our full school year. It can be a wonderful time for art, craft projects, cooking, gardening, and of course, reading aloud.

Remember, you are in charge of your school and schedule. You needn't do school "the way we've always done it", or the way the public school does it. You have flexibility, take advantage of it to meet the needs of your children!

It was wonderful to meet so many of you at the MHEEC convention, thank you for stopping to see me! More on high school in the next post....