Summer and Homeschooling | Barbara Frank Online

Do you homeschool during the summer? Some years we do, others we don’t. It depends on what’s going on with our family each year.

I enjoy both schedules, but I have to admit that summer is a great time to not think about homeschooling. Letting the whole family enjoy downtime gives everyone a break from the homeschool routine and gives me some breathing space. Besides, after being cooped up a lot during a very long winter, we’re really enjoying the beautiful weather.

This summer we won’t be doing school other than a weekly review for my son, who has developmental disabilities; there are just too many other things going on in our lives. But one thing I’ve learned in the past is that no matter how much I don’t want to think about homeschooling by the time June rolls around, come August I’ll be drooling over homeschool catalogs, hanging out at the teacher store and plotting my purchases.

So if you need the summer off, go ahead and take it. Let yourself be refreshed. You’ll have plenty of time to think about homeschooling later this summer.

13 thoughts on “Summer and Homeschooling”

I am generally a year-round homeschooler with my dd w/Ds. As I’ve matured as a homeschooling mama, I’ve let go of many of my own obsessive-compulsive ‘must get this done everyday’ attitude and let God have charge of our lives. What this means for our family is that we prioritize of all the opportunities that come our way during the summer. I usually get math and reading in and am grateful for that but I just don’t worry like I used to when my girls were younger. I know God will provide my children with what they need to do to to fulfill His plan for them.

I’m with Amy! We do homeschooling all year round, but we only do mornings all year. We don’t take all the ‘useless’ holidays off that public schools do, and we take various times off, depending on what our family is up to, what things need to be done around the house, vacations, etc. The nice thing is that just about everything can be turned into a learning opportunity! It took us a LONG time to get into the routine (with my strong-willed son) of doing school in the mornings, if we stopped for too long, we’d have to go through all that fighting again!

We’re not doing anything this summer. Well, I start again in August, so I guess I do teach in the summer, but we also end in May. So…we have three months off!!!!! WOO HOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Summer is a perfect time to tune into a virtual field trip to MEET ME AT THE CORNER, Virtual Field Trips for Kids (www.meetmeatthecorner.org) for free episodes and kid-friendly websites.

I plan to stop the big stuff come July. But I will be doing little suplemental stuff the rest of the summer. He needs to be kept busy.

The variety of responses here confirms my feeling that the freedom of homeschooling is a tremendous blessing 🙂

We spend the summer working on our 4-H projects (I’m a project leader for several projects) and getting ready for fair. My son thinks it’s summer vacation but he learns more about reading, writing, and accounting during the summer than he does the whole rest of the year! We really need the month of September off after doing fair’s in July and August. I think this year we may just have a Fall Vacation.

Janet, it does sound like you’re going to need a fall vacation after all that. We’ve done them before and they’re the best: nice weather, no crowds, cheaper rates…..and the kids loved being on vacation while the rest of the world was in school 🙂

Last year was the first year we did any school during the summer. We stopped lessons early in the spring and then started back in June. This year we are going all the way through. We had so many wonderful visits from family and friends this past year so we’ve had plenty of breaks.

Pingback: Principled Discovery » The Carnival of Homeschooling’s Field Guide to Homeschoolers

This yr. we are sticking to math & reading. Science always came naturally during summer break any way. The kids are doing things w/o thinking about it.

We homeschooled last summer because I had taken a break during the worst of the first trimester morning sickness. We’re homeschooling again this summer because I took a break after the baby was born. Hopefully next year we’ll actually be on a normal schedule!