Homeschool Curriculum for the Summer

Summer is a great opportunity to finish all that curriculum you didn't have a chance to use over the school year. However, the tree house beckons, the swimming pool calls out to you and the puffy little summertime clouds are just floating by in the sky, just waiting for some kid to look up and say "Mom, it's a wooly mammoth."

Is it possible to teach and learn in the summer time without "feeling" like you're teaching and learning? Consider adopting a summer time curriculum.

Summer where I live calls for regular visits to air conditioned places. We try to schedule one museum day each week. Wandering aimlessly through the museum helps kids discover new interests, and reinforce things they have already learned. Unlike a school-year field trip that might be scheduled to coincide with a specific lesson, a summer time visit to the museum can be just for fun.

Are you swimming this summer? Water pressure, buoyancy, and water displacement are all easy physics concepts to go over on the fly. If you lack the physics vocabulary to feel comfortable discussing this in the car or at the dinner table, look it up online. or better yet, have the kids research it. I'm thinking the reward for a verbal explanation of water displacement would be a great exchange for an extra hour in the pool. Or would you call it a water displacement laboratory?

Summer Camps can be a great source of summer learning fun. In addition to old-fashioned tree climbing, relay races, bee sting first aid, and campfire stories, many summer camps offer an arts and crafts program, theater arts and nature learning. You can also plan your own summer camp with other homeschoolers.

Many libraries have summer reading programs. Our local library offers children themed prizes for keeping up with their reading goals. Another air-conditioned field trip; the library is a great place for kids to explore new interests.

Are you taking a vacation? Whenever we prepare for road trips (the only kind of trip we take with 6 kids,) I tend to get a library book about our destination or print information from the internet so the kids can pre-study our destination. They get excited about seeing certain landmarks and will sometimes participate in making our itinerary.

Summer is a great time for long term projects. Gardening, building tree houses and hosting a yard sale or lemonade stand are all popular long-term summer projects for kids.

Maybe someone might say "You can't call that school." But the fact is, these are worthwhile educational pursuits and the lessons kids learn by living in a rich environment where they're stimulated to act and do can not be replaced with a television, or with curriculum left over from last year.