2024 Summer Learning & Rhythm
We like to take the summers off from our core homeschool work, but I’ve learned we all still need a little structure. This year I am going for a good balance between routine and those casual summer days.
Morning Time
We’re aiming to get a few routine-like things done in the mornings - things like chores, devotional, piano practice, and some summer bridge work - and then by 10:30 our days are pretty relaxed and flexible.
During our devotional time we usually do a hymn, a spiritual thought, practice the pledge, and usually some type of daily poetry reading. Every year I have every intention to do a poetry tea time, but it usually gets lost in the shuffle. So, I decided to try adding in something a little more structured and went with the Teatime Poetry Club from The Refined Schoolhouse. These monthly themed booklets have a piece of classical music to listen to, a suggested handicraft, 6-7 poems, an etiquette lesson, a recipe and a piece of art to study. My plan is to rotate through the poetry and art/music material during our devotional time and then once a month we will do our tea party with the etiquette lesson, the recipe, and handicraft. We’ll try it out this summer and if all goes well we’ll keep using it into our next school year.
During this time I also snagged two Discovery Decks from The Waldock Way. We’ve already started using these and the kids look forward to drawing new cards everyday and scanning the QR codes.
For our first family read aloud for the summer we’re planning to read Tom Sawyer since we just got back from visiting Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal is where Mark Twain grew up and we were able to see where he lived and some of the inspiration behind his book.
For our other subjects, most summers I love to use these summer bridge books, but this year my kids are all in a little different places and we have a few others areas I wanted to work on instead.
Between 5th-6th Grade
For my older girls, they will be starting Math 6 from The Good and The Beautiful. You can read about our experience with Math 5 here and in that post I talk about why I am taking more of a year-round approach with these upper level math courses.
The girls are avid readers so I know they’ll be getting lots of reading in over the summer. Here is a post I recently made on the books they’ve been reading over the last few months. Going forward, they’re free to choose what they want to read off our bookshelves. I did ask them to read Story of the World 3 & 4 though because I wanted them to finish this series before we start with a new history curriculum this fall.
Between 1st-2nd Grade
My son will be working on finishing up Math 2 from TGTB so he can start fresh in the fall with Math 3. Then he will just be doing lots of reading to work on fluency! We pay him a penny per page when he reads something on his reading level and this always is a great motivator for him in the summer. Last summer he read over 300 little readers so he’s motivated to do something similar this year. We have a great collection of books on his level from TGTB and the rest we get from the library.
Kindergarten Prep
This summer my youngest is working on getting his letter sounds down. One of his favorite activities is when we hide letters around the room and he has to go find them so we’ll be doing lots of little games and activities like this. We’ll also be finishing up the Kindergarten Prep course from TGTB and Level C from ETC. I have more on learning how to read on these two posts: Learning to Read At Home and A Peak Inside Explode the Code. You can also view all my early childhood learning favorites on my Amazon Store Front.
The Math Art Connection
For our main summer materials we will be using The Math Art Connection from Art Makes Me Smart and I am so excited about it! This new art release has 10 family-style units so we are going to focus on one unit a week all summer long - probably in the morning or when we have downtime at other times of our day. Here are some of the things we’ll be covering:
Ship Shape Composition: Shapes & Measurements
3D Shapes: Shading
Line Illusions: Lines & Rays
F is for Fish: Using Grids in Art
Country Roads: Perspective & Scale
Pythagorean Butterfly: Mirror and Symmetrical Sketches
Fibonacci Gold: Number Patterns & Sequencing
Spiraling Succulents: Ratios
Word Play: Geometry & Perspective
Hexagon Honeycombs: Fractions & Patterns
In each unit there are 2-3 video lessons with tutorials for kids of all ages. Each unit comes with a detailed supply list and book and YouTube recommendations. For example, this week we have been working on the Ship Shape Composition unit. We kicked off our week with a fun art project and my older kids were able to practice measuring using a T ruler and drawing circles with a compass. With each unit there is a PDF file with supplemental activities for younger kids so I printed my 5 year old a sheet that already had a bunch of shapes on it. He cut out a few shapes and I cut him out a bunch and then all the kids made their own pieces of art work with their shapes. We’ve watched the recommended videos and learned about shapes in relation to artwork, lines, rays, and angles, and also all about the father of geometry, Euclid. We also read Henri’s Scissors which was one of the recommended books to go along with this unit and it was so cute. The rest of the week we’ll be going over some of the discussion prompts from the unit and doing some of the other activities like a shape scavenger hunt. So far we are loving this and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the projects come together.
Summer Fun Ideas
Last, but not least, I put together a list my kids can refer to when we have some down time and thought I’d share it with you guys. I just used my summer rhythm template so if you wanted to make something similar with your own ideas it’d be super easy to do. I hope you all have a wonderful and safe summer!
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