Avoiding the notorious summer slide with year round homeschooling to keep the brain gears moving.
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The kids and I do like to break from school in the summer.
To spend more time exploring and enjoying the outdoors.
And pursuing other hobbies and interests.
But to avoid the notorious summer slide we began doing lessons during the break to keep their brains growing.
These lessons are not so much meant to teach new material, but to keep material that we learned over the past year fresh and in their minds.
Our Year Round Homeschool Schedule
We typically finish school sometime in June, then take a couple weeks off before we start up our summer lessons.
Our summer lessons go on until sometime in September when we start the new school year.
Year Round Homeschooling: Our Summer Lessons
The subjects we continue to cover for my six- and eight-year-olds are:
- Poetry
- Recitation
- Phonics
- Reading
- Math
- Handwriting
While it may seem like a lot it only takes less than 20 minutes for each child to complete everything.
Recitation and Poetry (2 minutes)
I chose a poem for each child to learn and recite for our summer term.
We align the poems with what we are learning about in nature study.
(I did not include nature study on the subject list as it is an informal class).
Most of our poetry selections come from Treehouse Schoolhouse Nature Studies.
Save 10% on your entire order at Treehouse Schoolhouse with the discount code THEHOMESTEADMOTHER
Phonics (2 minutes)
We are working our way through the rest of our Booster Cards from The Good and The Beautiful.
Once we complete the cards, we are going back to using Explode the Code.
Reading (10 minutes)
Each child reads one chapter from their reading book to me. Which ends up being about 10 minutes.
The books we are reading this summer are from the Ambleside Online free reading book list for years 1 and 3.
Math (2 minutes)
They each do a few math problems that never take more than a couple minutes to complete.
Handwriting (2 minutes)
Everyone copies a sentence from a book they are reading, or I dictate a sentence to them.
Sometimes I have them copy a portion of the poem they are reciting.
Year Round Homeschooling
In less than 20 minutes with each child all of their daily targets are covered.
The point isn’t to make them (or us) miserable.
It’s just to keep their brains working.
Until next time,
