June is here, and with it so too is the end of another school year. I always have mixed feelings about it. First, I feel overjoyed. No more late nights filled with homework. No more bits and pieces of paper, glitter, and glue spots spread across my floor from projects and posters. Gone are the rushed mornings of fighting to get everyone up, dressed, fed, and out the door. Yea, it’s around this time that I break into my happy dance. This joyful celebration is, however, always followed by a bittersweet realization. The little faces that started this school year seem so much older now. Time seems to have raced by, and the whole academic year was spent just trying to keep up. It’s the same story, same dilemma every year. I greet it wholeheartedly, and begrudgingly all at once. What can I say, I’m an emotional mommy at times.
But before the tears start falling, a smaller, but very real picture presents itself even louder than the others. How am I going to fill our long summer days?? Sweats begins to build on my forehead, and my palms grow cold. Ok, so it’s not all that serious. But really who wants their summer soundtrack set to kids whining about being ‘bored,’ while firmly planted in front of a T.V.? I for one am planning to skip it this year. Yes, we’ll be going out as often as possible, both for their sanity and mine. Not only because I have a toddler who needs to nap, and apparently only her crib will do. We also don’t have a money tree in our backgrounds to cover the cost of travel, food, etc. And the biggest reason of them all, drum roll please, “I don’t want to!”
I want my kids to find a balance between being adventures and being homebodies. There, I said it. I want them to enjoy going out and doing new things, also much as their time home. Being creative and having the ability to self-play, in my opinion, is a lost art. And full disclosure, we’ll be homeschooling all summer this time around.
My son’s schooling is year round. So avoid him feeling isolated, while also keeping my girls busy I decided to have a structured summer schedule. He’ll continue using his online curriculum, and in addition, he will be joining his sisters going through a unit based study as well. I choose this form because I’ll be teaching grades 8th, 7th, and 2nd at the same time. This unit based study was created understanding that multiple kids, in different grade levels would be learning together. It is also fairly untraditional (which will be a bit challenging for me). There will be plenty of hands-on projects, exploring our environment, discovering how things work in the real world, accompanied by some good old reading activities.