Our Summer Homeschool Subjects
We love summer. We love the garden, splash pads, trips, and hiking. We also get a little stir crazy being out of our routine so I opt to continue our homeschool year with summer school, just wildly toned down.
I know in the Charlotte Mason world it is prudent to give your children an extended summer break, but this is one area that I don’t comply with. The main reason we choose to continue a gentle school schedule for the summer is the simple fact that our family needs somewhat of a routine. My daughter and I both function best when we have routines in place and my toddler likes the predictability of the day. It’s better for all of us to continue to work on the habits of doing school work and have somewhat of a routine moving forward through the season. That being said, we have taken the last couple weeks off.
So what goes into our summer school schooling? I’m glad you’re wondering enough to check this blog!
Math: it’s important to me that we continue working on math skills during the summer. We’re taking this time to continue working on mastery of multiplication and division facts. We plan to be review and hopefully master equivalent fractions as well.
Grammar: Since my daughter is going to be starting year 4 of Amblesideonline next year, we plan to start working on her foundation of grammar. We have one year before begin Latin and in order to handle Latin well we need solid grammar skills.
Poetry: Each month we choose a poem to practice reciting, falling back on the method of recitation as laid out by Charlotte Mason. We love using the Nature poem and banners put together by The Whispering Glen. Since we are taking our first trip to the beach this year we decided to focus on ocean themed poems.
History and Biography: I like to use the summer time to get ahead on some of our content areas, particularly history. Since I manage a chronic pain disease that limits my capacity in the winter, summer time helps us schedule things in order to ease the burden of my pain. We’re reading parts of Answering the Cry For Freedom as we begin learning about the Revolutionary War .
Plutarch: Another aspect of Amblesideonline is integrating Plutarch into our lessons. We are using the summer to get our feet wet with Publicola. I have never read a word of Plutarch so I appreciate this time to slowly get acquainted.
Shakespeare: We also plan to use this time to read through Midsummer Night’s Dream. We have read through Edith Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare over the last three years. Since next year we will be reading through three Shakespeare plays, I wanted us to take the time to read one we’re very familiar with.
Spanish: We will continue to work on our Spanish lessons with Speaking Spanish with Miss Mason. During the school year we have about an hour of Spanish instruction a day but that gets toned down in the summer.
Read-aloud: Usually we tackle a book from our Ambleside booklist but this year we decided to read the Burgess Seashore Book. I’m excited for all the connections we’ll make after visiting the beach.
It might feel like a lot to do during the summer for school but we are actually able to get work done in about an hour each morning. This gives us plenty of time to stay in the habit of school while also allowing the time for all the traditional summer things.
We still make sure to have a lot of unstructured time to read, play, hike, garden, and craft. The fallback of summer school just helps us feel more organized and as a mom, I appreciate that there is at lease some plan to our day.
