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No matter how long we've been homeschooling, we are curious about how other homeschoolers do things. And homeschoolers who are newer to the game obviously have lots of questions! This series will try to answers some of the questions homeschoolers ask each other. Questions about how we handle some of the little details and about our opinions on different aspects of homeschooling. Questions that we all might answer differently because what works great in one family might not work at all in another.
Do You Homeschool Through the Summer?
For almost as long as I've been homeschooling, I've had some mixed feelings about taking a summer break. Of course we wanted to take vacation and enjoy time off school during the summer! But since we had the option of taking family vacations almost any time during the year, we really didn't need to take a break just because that's when everyone else did. Also, taking long breaks often meant the kids got rusty with math facts and we all got lazy and unmotivated without the structure of a school day.
After the first few years, what wound up happening was we got really relaxed in the spring, and were fine with not being completely finished with schoolwork until late June. And I quickly figured out that taking our family vacation in October and longish Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks would put us behind unless we started school in August. This became our annual rhythm and it worked quite well for us. We started a new school year in the first or second week of August, took full vacation breaks in the fall and winter, and gradually wrapped up the school year during May and June.
"Summer School" became something that was normal for us, even though we hadn't really intended to do it! Keeping some structure and planned learning happening during the summer helped us all stay relatively sane, but having much shorter school days only a couple days a week gave us plenty of opportunity to sleep late and do all kinds of fun summer activities. So while it wasn't perfect or planned out well all the time, I think overall we had the best of both worlds.
Now for some actual how-to . . . if you do homeschool during the summer, how do you keep records? What I did was create an extra "semester" in my Homeschool Tracker Online called Summer School. Then I changed due dates of any incomplete assignments from the school year just ended (officially) so they fell into the new semester. For high school credit courses, I marked assignments Complete but without a grade for the school year just ended if I had awarded the credit but still wanted my kids to finish that particular assignment. And any grades earned during the Summer Semester would be shifted to the new school year once it was set up.
How do you handle summer breaks? Leave a comment and let me know what works for you - or leave a homeschool question you're curious about.
This post is part of the June 2019 Homeschool Collection on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.
Don't miss a coffee break! Subscribe to Homeschool Coffee Break by Email!After the first few years, what wound up happening was we got really relaxed in the spring, and were fine with not being completely finished with schoolwork until late June. And I quickly figured out that taking our family vacation in October and longish Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks would put us behind unless we started school in August. This became our annual rhythm and it worked quite well for us. We started a new school year in the first or second week of August, took full vacation breaks in the fall and winter, and gradually wrapped up the school year during May and June.
"Summer School" became something that was normal for us, even though we hadn't really intended to do it! Keeping some structure and planned learning happening during the summer helped us all stay relatively sane, but having much shorter school days only a couple days a week gave us plenty of opportunity to sleep late and do all kinds of fun summer activities. So while it wasn't perfect or planned out well all the time, I think overall we had the best of both worlds.
Now for some actual how-to . . . if you do homeschool during the summer, how do you keep records? What I did was create an extra "semester" in my Homeschool Tracker Online called Summer School. Then I changed due dates of any incomplete assignments from the school year just ended (officially) so they fell into the new semester. For high school credit courses, I marked assignments Complete but without a grade for the school year just ended if I had awarded the credit but still wanted my kids to finish that particular assignment. And any grades earned during the Summer Semester would be shifted to the new school year once it was set up.
You can find out more about this versatile online record-keeping solution in my full review: Homeschool Tracker Online
How do you handle summer breaks? Leave a comment and let me know what works for you - or leave a homeschool question you're curious about.
This post is part of the June 2019 Homeschool Collection on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.
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