Summer {Fun} School

I decided to do “Summer School” with my boys this year.  I’ve always been somewhat relaxed during summer, but now that they’re getting older, I feel it’s important to keep their minds active and engaged. (As well as keeping their skills up.)  I wanted it to be more of an educational fun though, so we’re calling it “Summer Fun School”. 

To start off, we thought it’d be fun to do a theme a week.  So we came up with a list of 20 themes, then grouped some of them and cut the rest out.  (Maybe we’ll do those next summer.)    Next, we picked weeks to do each theme—we did this by marking it directly on the calendar so we could work it into things we are already doing.  We scheduled “Oceans” the week we are going on vacation to Washington where we will be seeing a lot of ocean time, and “Farm Animals” the week of our county fair.

Next, we made up a schedule of things to do each day.  Monday is math and history, Tuesday is science and service, Wednesday is a food experience, Thursday is art and music, Friday is a review of the topic using any activities, and Saturday is a fieldtrip as a family since Dad isn’t at work.  This is just a guideline though, and depending on what else is going on, I’ve prepared the boys to be somewhat flexible.  And just because we did math on Monday, doesn’t mean we can’t work it in throughout the week.  I also bought my kids some special notebooks that we will write in everyday to work on writing skills and spelling.  This is the last thing we do at the end of “School”. 

We also have a daily schedule of what we’re going to do throughout the day.  The plan is to do cleaning and exercise in the morning, followed by some play time.  After lunch we will read and have school.  School will take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on the activities planned. 

I will be posting each week as it is done, to share the activities and things we did!

Happy summer fun creating!