Our Summer Homeschool Schedule
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It’s that time of year again. Time to plan my homeschool schedule for the coming year. This time always excites me, because I love planning. My imagination goes wild with the things that I can do with my kids in the coming year. All the possibilities excite me, and I tend to go overboard just a little bit.
But this year I am forcing myself to keep a check on my excitement. So many times I plan activities, thinking that I will have the discipline to follow through. But in the day to day schoolwork, so many of those awesome plans get set aside. This year I will attempt to simplify our schoolwork.
Our Overall Schedule
The first thing that I did was to sit down and plan out our overall homeschool schedule for this year. In years past, I just had a loose calendar “set in Jello”. I didn’t really plan what days we would actually be in session. This made it so that it was all too easy to just decide to take a day off when I didn’t feel like having school.
But in the past few weeks I realized that this does not demonstrate a good work ethic for my kids. No one else gets to just take a day off whenever they feel like it. But because we are homeschooling, we do get an immense amount of freedom to determine when we have school..
Our new school year starts in June, and we school year round. This gives us the ability to have many off days during the year. It also means that we don’t experience the usual “summer forgetfulness” that happens sometimes over the three months of the summer.
I sat down with a 2019-2020 calendar and started marking off the days that we take off. Since we usually take Wednesdays off I automatically crossed those off. I then looked through our holidays and vacations, and marked those off as well. I colored each off day in pink so that each one will be easy to spot. (Bear Bear and Super Stuffy looked at the calendar and cheered, because a lot of it is pink.) Now it is not me that determines each off day, it is the calendar. Yeah!
The Subjects We’re Going to Cover This Summer
Once I created our overall calendar, I turned my attention to the individual subjects that I want to focus on during the summer. These subjects are Bible, History, Science, Reading, and Writing. We also agreed that we are going to work through one lesson of math every two weeks so that we don’t forget the math that we’ve already been through.
- Bible – We’re going to make our way through Danika Cooley’s Bible Road Trip Year 2. We are going to study the Bible as a family, but then each child and myself will be required to do Bible reading on our own. All three of us will be notebooking our trip through year 2, and we will create memory verse cards to go along with the curriculum.
- History – I love history, but I have a hard time teaching it. So, we are going to start with the five book series “Rush Revere”. I will be reading the books by chapter every other school day throughout the summer (basically, 5 times every two weeks). As I read, the kids and I will be narrating and notebooking our journey through these books.
- Science – On the days that we do not study history, we will be studying science. We will look for library books on science topics that the kids are interested in and read them. We will also narrate and notebook our journey through these books.
-along with our science reading, we will be working our way through Exploring Nature with Children. I have tried to work through this for several different years, but always found reasons not to go outside for a nature walk. I’m hoping that with our calendar set for the year, that will be enough to motivate me to get it done. We will do our nature study twice a week.
- Reading – This subject has always caused my greatest struggle. I love to read, but my kids would rather do anything else. I have gone back and forth between requiring them to read for a certain amount of time each day and leaving that decision in their hands. For the summer I require that they both read a chapter per day in a book of their choice, or two picture books daily. Our local library has a summer reading program as well, so we use that as extra motivation. I am still on the lookout for a good reading journal to keep track of the books that we read, and I believe that I will make my own.
- Writing – This subject also causes a lot of anxiety for me as well. I love to write, but I have no idea how to teach it. I have tried different ways of encouraging my kiddos to write, but nothing works. My writing cannot be forced, so I know I can’t expect to force my kids. This summer I am going to use the Student Writing Intensive from iew.com. It takes the writing process and breaks it up into manageable chunks that we can all do together. Hopefully by the end of the summer we will all enjoy our writing time.
Our Daily Summer Homeschool Schedule for 2019
Our daily summer homeschool schedule will look like this:
- Bible study with Bible Road Trip all together – notebooking included
- Individual Bible reading time
- Science/History all together – notebooking included
- Quiet reading time
- Writing/Grammar all together
I hope that this schedule keeps us on track but also gives us plenty of free time to enjoy our summer. Please leave a comment below to tell me your summer homeschool schedule.
