One of the best things I can do for our homeschool during the summer is think back on the previous year and evaluate what worked and what didn’t. After I figure that out, I can move into organizing the school room and planning for the year ahead.
What Worked:
Doing school right away in the morning. The kids definitely learn the best right after breakfast, and they’re a lot more willing to sit down and work on things than they are later in the day. Having a block of time from 9:00-11:00 or so of school work and read alouds went really well.
Our math and reading curriculum choices. (You can see all of our choices here). Saxon Math was really structured for Jonah, and he does well with having the concepts reviewed multiple times, because that makes him feel really smart that he already knows how to do those things. The Ordinary Parents Guide To Teaching Reading is also going really well to teach all the phonetical minutia that comes with learning to read the English language. We got about halfway through it with Jonah, and just started it with Matthew as well before the end of the year. I liked our science and history choices, but we did have a few issues with those (more on that below).
Going to the library on Mondays. I made book lists ahead of time for Letter of the Week books, as well as extra reading that went with our history and science lessons, and we went to the library pretty much every Monday. The kids thought it was fun, and it helped me feel like if nothing else happened, we had good books to read and learn through. We’ve continued this through the summer, although we’ve shifted to every other Monday because of vacations and a more relaxed schedule. We’re currently doing the Read The World Summer Book Club, which you can read more about here.
Letting go of my need-to-be-structured a little bit. This is that thing I’ve read that all homeschool parents get to at some point – you have your baseline for the most important things that you want to get to every school day, and everything else can just kind of happen when it happens. Sarah Mackenzie talks about this in Teaching From Rest, and it’s so true.
There are certain things I know we want to do every day. And there are other things that we can skip sometimes. And even though it messes up my pretty typed-out schedule, I’m starting to be a bit more relaxed about it.
What Didn’t Work:
Trying to come back to school right away in the afternoon. This was totally a “me” problem. After lunch the kids would all go upstairs – the girls would nap and the boys would have quiet time. Starting in March, I was usually busy working on something for the blog, and I didn’t want to use up the last bit of nap time on school work when I could be getting my own tasks done. I try to only work on tasks during rest time that need my focus and an uninterrupted block of time, which is smart, and I love my coffee/work time right after lunch. But we never got back into doing our history and science, which isn’t going to work in the long term. We can do those while the girls are awake. I just need to make sure I don’t get distracted and not come back to them.
Having plans for too many projects and extra things. This was especially noticeable with Story of the World. Before last school year started, I went through each chapter and picked out a few activities and projects that looked fun and sounded like the kids would be able to do them and learn from them. Whether it was because of the time of day we were getting to history, or just because it was one thing too many, we left over half of those projects undone. And then I felt like we should have done them.
Planning weeks by date. I’ll be talking more about how I plan my school year in a few weeks, but for the 2015-2016 year I planned all of my lessons based on the calendar dates. And then as soon as we fell behind, which is really inevitable, I felt really behind. I’m taking Jamie’s advice here and just giving my weeks numbers for next year. Because when it’s November 3, I’ll feel a lot better about only being on Week 7 than I will about being on October 11.
My art display. This is a totally small thing that doesn’t affect our learning in the least, but I thought it would be fun, and it was a flop. I hung two ribbons next to the door with clothespins on them, so we could hang up several of the pictures and projects the kids made. We started off the first couple weeks with an apple-themed project, B is for beads glued onto a letter B silhouette, and cave paintings that we made the second lesson or so of Story of the World. Guess what was still hanging there at the end of the school year? I finally took those down and now I have some pictures hanging that the kids drew more recently. At least if those stay up there for a year, our family through the eyes of a five-year-old is really adorable.
What about you? What worked this year, or what didn’t? Before you jump into planning next year, take some time to think about how the past year went, and what you might want to do differently.
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