Summer School

We are on a year-round school schedule. Officially, the boys do a regular school year with their cyber school, and complete a grade "on schedule" every year now. However, that's just the formality. There are a couple of reasons we supplement their curriculum and continue to learn through the summer.

• We want to make learning a habit of daily life.
• We don't want learning to be reserved for only formal situations.
• We want to instill a belief that study and education can be fun and that we don't need set times to be "relieved" of the "burden" of learning, because we don't believe it is a burden.
• We want to keep academics flowing at a reasonable pace, so that we don't have to waste time recapping what they learned last year at the beginning of the next year.
• While boredom does foster creativity to some extent, and we appreciate that, there is only so much summer boredom that can be tolerated before the kids start fighting and Mama's had it up to here.
• It's a great activity for those especially hot days when we can't enjoy the outside due to heat, and it's hot enough inside to require us to keep physical activity to a minimum.

So those are some of our reasons. If you've gotten the impression that I'm cracking the whip and torturing my children with 6 hours of mind-numbing bookwork every beautiful summer day, take that impression out of your brain and put it away, silly.

Because we school year round, we have the privilege of being relaxed during the school year, and even more relaxed in the summer. I had considered making a schedule and pulling together some kind of curriculum, but in the end I really didn't need to, and I prefer our relaxed, one-day-at-a-time style.

This is how our "school" looks in the summer:

We start with a morning walk. Gebreyesus especially made me promise that we would do this. In the winter, and because of Asrat's live online classes during the school year, we had trouble fitting walks in. But now that we have freedom in our schedule, we can take a morning ramble up and down the hills in our neighborhood, chatting with fellow walkers, watching the birds, checking out the plants that catch our interest.

Once breakfast, cleanup, and walking is out of the way, we usually start with our books. Both Asrat and Gebreyesus are working through Discoveries in Reading boxes, at their grade levels. We are a houseful of bookworms, so this is fun for them, and most days they are more than eager to do a book (or two) and the activities. After we do those, each one does a few pages in a math workbook of some sort. Asrat's 3rd grade classes did not finish some of what was sent with the curriculum (courtesy of PSSA prepping, I believe, which is a shame). So we have a whole book of American historical figures and one on Greek mythology (complete with workpages and many activity suggestions) that we can use together to cover things like reading practice, social studies/history, writing, etc.

In the afternoons, the boys do a little practice with Khan Academy , and might also choose some activities at sites like BrainPop or FunBrain and occasionally PBS Kids . If we can substitute a fun educational video for bookwork, we do it. (And while we're trolling youtube, we also often manage to get a little "cultural" education in--in the form of Loony Tunes or The Pink Panther, perhaps) Reading Hour continues, though in the summer it is often pre-empted by outside play and walks with Baba. As we get further into the summer, we will be enjoying regular days at the park with our friends, Vacation Bible School (maybe several), and other fun activities for which we will gladly ditch bookwork. Every Saturday we visit our beloved library to restock the house with books to read for the sheer enjoyment of reading, and books to learn from.

For science, the plan is a once- or twice-a-week learning experience, in the form of an experiment. The library is hosting Chemistry for Kids (from the Carnegie Science Center) which we will be attending as well.

All in all, summer school for us is minimal bookwork, minimal work for me, extremely low cost, and best of all...FUN.