With each new year, I often try to reflect back on the past year and uncover what in our family’s rhythms, habits, and goals have been a good fit or what needs to shift. This accounts for all areas of our family’s way of living. Food, activities, bedtime routines, and all. By doing this, I find that creating a family vision for our new year is more intentional and whole-hearted, including our homeschool.
WHY WE CHOSE NOT TO TAKE THE TRADITIONAL 12 WEEKS OFF FOR SUMMER BREAK
I knew taking the entire Summer off from formal lessons wasn’t the direction fit for us. My daughter (5yrs old) will be done with her Kindergarten curriculum by early May. Although a break is going to be necessary, I don’t believe taking the traditional 12 weeks off for Summer benefits us and our family vision and here’s why:
My husband and I love to travel and camp, and now that my children are getting older and more active, we want traveling and camping to be a normal activity we do throughout the year. Also, because we live in AZ, Summer months (actually from March-September) can get well over 110+ degrees outside and not the best for camping (or really anything besides swimming). Truthfully, Summer for us might just be the best time for homeschool lessons since we spend most of our time indoors anyways.
OUR INTENTIONS FOR SUMMER BREAK
With that said, I am planning to space the traditional 12(ish) weeks of break time throughout our year. This is going to allow us to take more time off when it’s more fitting for our family vacations, special holidays like Christmas and even birthdays since all of our birthdays are in the Fall.
Since my daughter will be done with Kindergarten by early May, we will take about 1-2 months off from formal school lessons. During this time, I’ll be focusing more on habit training such as teaching new house chores, new hobbies like sewing, and possibly swim lessons if pools are open. I’d also love to thrift a keyboard and start piano lessons with her, learning together!
Of course I still want my children to have a fun Summer break with less “scheduled” activities but I also don’t want to fall into the unhealthy habit of not feeding our minds and keeping the love of learning alive in our home. I also do not want to promote laziness as a “reward” for all the hard work into homeschool lessons and then have a rough start to a new school year because our minds and hearts weren’t being fed for an entire break. I’m raising kingdom kids, not couch potatoes, after all. Besides, kids thrive on routine, and our family sees the fruit of that when we’re intentional about it.
When the end of Kindergarten rolls around, we will sit down and set some goals for our family to aim for during our Summer Break. Things like a book reading goal (both independent and read alouds as a family), new hobbies or skills we might want to learn, places we want to travel to, ect.
HOW WE WILL IMPLEMENT YEAR-ROUND FORMAL LESSONS
Looking at our own family schedule and special events, I picked our dates that we ideally want a week or two off from formal lessons. I then worked our homeschool days around the time off we wanted. (I truly love that I’m able to do this with our homeschooling!)
We are going to try 12 weeks on, and our family’s personalized breaks in between for 3 terms making our homeschool lessons equivalent to 36 weeks. Our curriculum choices (new blog post on our 1st grade curriculum picks to come!) fit perfectly with this timeline as well.
We will begin 1st grade Math, Language Arts and basic intro U.S. Geography focusing on learning the 50 states and capitals. We will continue to stick to a 4 day homeschool week and leave Friday’s open for travel days or days to be open for planned activities or free play at home. The plan is to start early July.
By August I will add subjects like science, history, penmanship, arts, and literature to our homeschool rhythm. These subjects are usually 1-3 times a week and usually only take 10-20 minutes so the overall time we spend doing lessons isn’t an overload. In fact, when compared to our Kindergarten rhythm, we are only adding two additional subjects (science and history) which will hopefully make the transition to first grade go effortlessly (but I know there will be mishaps along the way).
BREAKS FOR YEAR ROUND
As I mentioned earlier, we will get to take more frequent breaks throughout the year since we are not taking the traditional summer break off from homeschool lessons. Our first break will be at the end of October, ending our first term. In our second term we will have 3 breaks for important holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and a break at the end term 2. If we follow this schedule, we will be done with term 3 and the end of 1st grade by early May of next year, bringing us right back to where we started.
YEAR ROUND HOMESCHOOL BENEFITS
My goal at the end of each term is to evaluate how the new schedule is working for my family, and my children’s learning pace. I believe going year round will work in our favor if we ever needed to slow down for any reason and still have wiggle room to complete lessons before the official transition to the next grade up.
Let me just debunk this myth:
Going year round doesn’t mean we will be doing more school work. For example, we will complete 36 school weeks this year for Kindergarten, and will do 36 weeks for first grade. The only difference is that, for Kindergarten, we started later in the Fall and didn’t have that many breaks, resulting in having to “catch up” or encroach on top of holiday plans. For first grade, it’s my hope that by going year round it’ll bring a better balance for family adventures, slower rhythms around holidays, and ultimately enrich my children’s home education.
If you’d like to follow along our homeschool journey and see more day-to-day insights and encouragement, be sure to follow me over on Instagram at @ourcoopernest (:
