Last Day of Homeschool 2023
Last week we celebrated our last day of school for the year. The kids chose to go out to breakfast at Denny’s. By this time of year, I’m all about someone else making the breakfast, ha! We had the kindest waitress I’ve probably ever had. She asked what were celebrating and when I told her we homeschooled and this was our last day of school celebration she praised the kids for their hard work and commented that she thought homeschooling was such a good idea in today’s world. I know you all know how validating that can feel. After we’d eaten, gone to the bathroom way too many times, and paid - we were getting ready to walk out the door when my oldest son was begging me for $1 for the claw machine full of stuffed animals. I checked my wallet, but I didn’t have any change so I told him we’d have to do it another time. Our waitress overheard our conversation and walked right over, pulled out her wallet and gave all of my kids $1 for the machine. She said today was a day to celebrate their hard work and they deserved a chance to win. No one won anything, but I hope my kid’s never forget her generosity.
After, we stopped by a toy store to pick up a birthday gift and then headed to Barnes & Noble. This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but my kids have never been in a big book store so I knew we needed to remedy that. To say they were in heaven may be an understatement. I was so happy that they were so happy to be there. It was such a joy wandering the isles and browsing books. The kids played with puppets and we left with stack of books that included some of the kid’s current favorites - Harry Potter and Star Wars. The kids spent the rest of the day playing outside with friends. It was simple, but perfect and I think we might just make this a yearly last day of homeschool tradition. What a great way to start the summer - in a bookstore!
Navigating school-related traditions as a homeschooler looks a little different for everyone so I thought I would take a minute and share about why we have settled on having first/last days of school. The question of year-round homeschooling versus taking summers off seems to get brought up a lot this time of year. You can’t go wrong either way, but if you’re still sorting through some of these thoughts, here’s been our experience thus far.
Let me back up and rewind to our very first “last day of homeschool” in May of 2020 just to share our experience from a little bit wider perspective. It was right in the middle of the pandemic and we had pulled our twins out of public school the November before so I was still trying to navigate what in the heck the last day of school even meant for us. I think I was following like 5 homeschoolers on IG - I didn’t even realize there was much of a homeschool community out there…so I was just kind of doing my own thing. Anyway, I remember waking up the morning all of the kids in our neighborhood were having their last day of on-line learning and thinking - all I want to do is start our next science unit! So, we did! Shortly after, a really good friend of mine stopped by with donuts in celebration of the last day of school and then I just remember feeling like I wasn’t sure how I wanted to navigate all these special days with my kids now. I remember questioning - why would we “stop” learning? And what would even be the point of putting everything aside just to have to re-learn it all a few months later? Even though we were only a short few months into homeschooling, I had already really embraced the idea that homeschooling meant so much more than just doing school at-home. I recognized homeschooling was more like a lifestyle and one that ultimately supported a home in which we would always be learning in.
So, I went on with that ideal, but it took me about a week to realize that even despite the pandemic and social distancing, there was buzz in our neighborhood that summer was here and school was over. It was contagious and when other kids started stopping by asking to play, there was no way I was going to tell my kids that they couldn’t go out because they had to do their schoolwork. So, more naturally than not, we put some of our more formal studies away and jumped into summer.
Even before we homeschooled I had always done some very simple summer learning workbooks and activities and lots of reading with my kids to help with the summer slide. So I just fell back on some of the things we’d always done. In the morning we like to have a little more structure and family time. We aim for our morning devotional and scriptures and then the kids do a little school related work and also some house work. We usually try to wrap things up by 10:30. By the way, I have tried a handful of summer workbooks and personally the Summer Bridge Books are my favorite so if you are looking for something easy over the summer - these are the ones I’d recommend. This year we have some other fun plans…but I’ll share more about that in a few weeks! We’re headed on an RV trip here shortly, but when we get back, we’re going to be jumping into one of our courses a little earlier than normal…and can you guess what we’ll be reading? :)
Anyway, that first summer I continued to sit on how we wanted to navigate special days, milestones, and holidays. I recognized that my nostalgia was not my kid’s nostalgia so I knew they were coming into a lot of these school-related milestones - like the first/last day of school traditions - with a blank slate. The beauty of homeschool is we can create, create, create whatever we want these days and traditions to look like. This idea of creating our family traditions around these days really breathed life into my soul and I knew it’s something I wanted to do with the kids.
Another thing I have observed is that since we live in a neighborhood where most of the kids go to the same public school and also go to our same church - many of my kid’s social circles continue to have children that experience these special milestones. Our local community has done a really great job to go out of their way to always include the homeschooled children in our neighborhood and my kids have even been invited to some last day of school parties. So as the years have gone by, it just has always felt very natural for us to continue to have first and last school days. And, in a round about way, I can tell it helps my own kids still feel part of our local community. Even though this is peer-driven, it gives them a needed closure to the school year and I’ve found I like that closure too.
We also travel a lot more during the summer season and it just feels like our social calendars are always calling - pool parties and park dates and late nights! There is always something going on. So with the constant disruptions in our rhythms and a lot of our travel prep and clean up on me - it just is a lot easier for my mental load to set aside some of our more formal work.
So each year I have settled on choosing a start date to go back to our formal studies - usually sometime in August. If we did formal studies all the way through May, honestly, I think I’d wait to go back after Labor Day. But, we like to finish up in early May so we can travel the later half of the month. Plus, after Utah’s long winters - we all have major spring fever. Either way, come the end of summer, a set date helps me make a mental shift. And, for the most part, it just makes sense to align closer to a typical public school. At this point, I don’t stress too much about maintaining a strict schedule though. The first year I tried to plan our “off” days around our local school’s off days and quickly learned I didn’t need to do that. My personality is such that we work hard when we’re able and we take days off when we need or want them. You can’t predict hard days so embrace them. Also, if all the neighborhood kids are playing on a public school day that’s off - great - I definitely let my kids go out and join in. And, if we happen to forget and nothing is really going on - we carry on as usual. We often take a longer break around Christmas - have slower days in January and February, but it all seems to smooth out. I rarely feel stressed to try to squeeze it all in. And each year has looked a little different. Last year we actually started earlier than I had planned because my kids were so excited, ha! Knowing all of these things I just try to keep an eye on our lesson count and plan our studies accordingly.
Last fall, I did a blog post all about our first day so if you’re looking for some inspiration on traditions make sure to check out: Back to Homeschool 2022.
Last week on our “last day of school,” my six year old was sitting at our kitchen counter and asked me, “But, Mom, when will the first day of school be again?” We all laughed, but it made me smile because I am so happy he’s already feeling some of the family-centered nostalgia we’ve created. Really, we’re always still learning and embracing the homeschool lifestyle - it’s just in a different way in the summer!