This Homeschooling Life #23

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Another month and I’m here again wondering what to write. June was uneventful in terms of homeschooling. The basics happened – Life of Fred, reading, daily journaling, a few science experiments here and there {hello a kitchen slime laboratory!}. We’ve played, and crafted, and painted, watched a few documentaries, talked a lot about a whole heap of different topics, been to home ed group and met up with friends. Book Club book for the month was How To Steal a Dog, which the girls really enjoyed reading, and brought some interesting conversations along the way about family relationships, right and wrong, laughing at other people, and doing good deeds without wanting any thanks.

Last month I also took Lola back out of school, probably only temporarily. We’ve had numerous issues with the school over the last few months, which was causing her a lot of stress and anxiety, so, for now, she’s back home. Yay! We’re currently investigating options for September as she really wants to go to school. No school gave us the freedom to take a mid-week break, so we headed back across country for a few days with my Dad and Step-mum. We managed to time it with the heat wave, so the kids spent a couple of days in the pool in his garden, and I got to sit and do nothing for a couple of days – a very rare treat.

We’re moving into summer mode over here, July and August usually end up being full of trips, holidays, days in the garden, catching up with friends and generally making the most of the {hopefully} sunny weather. The girls and I sat down the other day, and had a chat about our plans for the next few weeks. While more time will be spent out of the house, we’ll still be carrying on with some of our ‘homeschool’ work. This is what summer for us will look like in terms of ‘school stuff’…

* Life of Fred – the girls love this for Maths so much, we usually do around 3/4 chapters a week
* Book Club – we’re reading Book of a Thousand Days and Journey to the River Sea over the summer
* Reading Challenge – the last few years I’ve run a reading challenge with the kids, to encourage them to read even more. I’ve picked out five books each that I’d like them to read, and then they have free pick for as many more as they can read!
* Unit Study – the girls have both picked a unit study to work on over the summer – Kiki choose a penguin unit, and Baya one about cats!
* Journals – we’ve just set up Summer Journals for them to record the books they’ve read, things we’ve done, places we’ve been – I thought it would make a nice memento of the summer to look back on.
* Art & Craft – the girls spend a lot of time creating off their own back, but I like to find a something we can all work on together once a week or so – we love some of the tutorials at Deep Space Sparkle, or these Exploring Great Artist e-books.

Do you homeschool all year round, or do you take a break for the summer?

1 Comment

  1. Adele

    July 6, 2017 at 21:10

    Lovely to hear what you guys have been up to, Polly. We’re at the beginning with Life of Fred and loving it. We’re only doing stuff we’d do anyway so I can’t see us taking a “break” over the summer but it’ll be interesting to see if things do change with lots of visitors coming and going.

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