Summer is much anticipated around here and it’s not because we don’t have formal lessons (we somewhat homeschool year-round).
Summer for us is a time when I can be more intentional, filling our days with more truth beauty, and goodness from outside the home.
Summer plans aren’t just for kids though. This mom longs for Summer days sitting in the mountains by a lake, nose-deep in a book while the children hunt for shells and treasure on the shore. However, I also know as a homeschool mom, that there is intentional, and good work to be done to continue to cultivate household habits, prepare for the new school year, continue to nourish my own mind and body, and partner with my children to help them do the same.
When it comes to any planning, I am a physical pen and paper kinda gal, and I love to put my plans on paper using my Juniper Grove Journal for things like this. It’s nothing fancy, really. Just a simple collection of lists, notes, ideas, and reasons for our plans that I’ve taken time to reflect on and think through. To keep things somewhat organized here, I’ve divided my Summertime plans into four categories– habits, morning rhythm, home, and nourishing leisure.
Habits
For reference, my children are 4 and 7. The habits I will work on with them are household habits and moral habits. For my oldest, she will begin a couple of new chores including taking out the bathroom trash, wiping down bathroom sinks, and doing laundry. She and her brother already sort and put away their own clothes, but this year she’ll take it to the next level with my help and complete her laundry from start to finish. I will also have her continue to help in the kitchen for dinner prep about 2x a week, but our aim is that she will be able to help more with the stovetop cooking for things like browning meat, sauteing veggies, or stirring pasta.
My 4-year-old is also getting promoted to bathroom sink duty. He will help with salad prep for dinner, and help put dishes in the dishwasher after our meals.
Other areas of habit training include continuing good hygiene practices, table manners, food sensory development/eating, greeting and sending off people who come and go in our home (hugs, waves, or high fives, and eye contact when saying hello and goodbye).
Habits For Mom
Habits that I am working on for me include resetting and refreshing my morning and evening rhythms. In these rhythms, this includes getting in exercise more consistently and something new I’ve enjoyed is deep stretching before bed. Another area I’ll be working on is work habits for OCN (Our Cooper Nest). I have had to take a major step back in the last month or so on social media as I work to bring in Collection II of homeschool planners (coming the week of May 22nd, 2023 to the shop!) so I’d love to plan out content to pick back up and remain consistent throughout the homeschool year, while also being intentional about blocking working time, and balancing it with homemaking, motherhood, homeschooling, rest and leisure.
Morning Table Time
While we’ve enjoyed the last couple of weeks with a less structured rhythm, I also notice how important small rhythms throughout Summer “break” for homeschool makes a difference when starting a new homeschool year strong. We will continue with arithmetic lessons, and daily copywork for my soon-to-be Year 3 student in the morning. For my soon-to-be kindergartner, I’ll be partnering with him to continue to improve his habit of attention with longer read alouds and time out of doors observing nature. We’ll also continue practicing his sums and number identification practice in a “by-the-way” sense with games, baking, and play. Our morning collective will continue including Ambleside Online‘s rotations for hymns, folksongs, and we review our artist work from the previous years. I plan to include seasonal poems from some of our poetry books but mostly allow the kids to pick which poetry book to read from together.
While we typically have Bible readings in the mornings with AO’s Bible reading schedule, my husband and I have talked about beginning our own family Bible study time in the evenings together and Summer seemed like the best time to start this new habit! This will probably look like my husband or I reading aloud from our Bibles, the children following along in their own Bibles, followed by discussing anything that stands out to them. We might include some open-ended questions to spark further discussion (age appropriate) but our goal is to form the habit of reading the Bible regularly together, building upon that habit, and go from there.
We will also start a new family read aloud together which I pulled from AO’s list of free reads. We started a new evening rhythm of reading before bedtime as a family. We alternate our weeknights with reading/looking at books (usually picture books from our library hauls) with the kids in their beds, and other nights all of us pick a cozy spot in the living room to read our own books quietly on our own. The kids love this new alternating evening rhythm, and I do too!
Home
Because we just moved into our new rental home this January, I have some unfinished organizing and decorating I’d like to tackle over the Summer. This includes hanging some artwork, relocating the nature table and all its treasures, and organizing our art supplies cabinet, which I’d like to relocate to another room in the house for easier access to it for the kids.
Another area of home plans is to create a master meal plan for the homeschool week which will help with dinner and lunch prep when lessons begin, taking the everyday meal prepping task to a more automatic habit on repeat.
Nourishing Leisure
While we currently don’t have entire mornings dedicated to being at our homeschool table, I believe being intentional with how we spend our time is vital to our home education and giving my children a rich and purposeful life. Although we are not completely screen-free around here, we do aim to spend the majority of our days away from screens and out of doors, baking, reading many good books, playing, creating, and (dare I say) getting bored.
The simple things I’m looking forward to enjoying with my children this Summer are things like making popsicles on a hot AZ Summer day while the kids play in our backyard sprinkler, fishing at the lake, playing in the creeks, camping in the pine trees, and roasting marshmallows around the campfire with friends and family.
I also plan to find some local events we can enjoy together as a family such as plays, musicals, farmers market trips, museums, and parks throughout the next couple of months.
The beauty of a Charlotte Mason education is that school and life are often intertwined, and Summer is a perfect season to slowly welcome new life-giving practices that may be more difficult to do during the formal homeschool year.
Amanda | Our cooper nest
Nourishing Leisure for Mom
Once we finished our homeschool year for 2022-2023, I immediately jumped into work mode for OCN’s Collection II of homeschool planners and while I have been working really really hard, I can also give out a sigh of relief that this good work is about to be completed and I can turn my attention to another area of mind-work that I love – homeschool preparation! Over the Summer I will finish up my pre-reading plans, and finish homeschool preparations before we begin our 2023-2024 homeschool year.
I will also begin A Mother’s Education by Bethany Anne Howard of Little World Wanderers which I am really eager to get started! This is a continuation of my own education, and though I learn so much alongside my children in all the living books we read together, this is something I get to do on my own, for my own. What I love about A Mother’s Education is that it encompasses a full Charlotte Mason education in just one volume, for the course of a year created to be done at your own pace. Diving into this, I will get to explore nature journaling, commonplacing, narration, handicrafts, and a handful of really great living books selected for biography, history, poetry, mythology, science, fairy tales, education, and literature. I plan to start in June, and I’ll be happy to update you along the way!
Using my Summer purposefully is something that I know will give us a strong start at the beginning of our upcoming homeschool year, but Summer won’t look like anything uncommon, necessarily. We are not filling the calendar up with endless outings and events to stay busy and are formal lessons are minimal. We get to live a restful and intentional life this way. I get to cultivate and freshen up habits and rhythms that will ultimately bless us in the long run, especially when we begin homeschool again.
That is what we are looking forward to this Summer, and I pray I can remain present in the season, soaking in the sunshine and savoring the memories we’ll make!
I hope this was helpful, insightful, and encouraging to you in some way.
Do you make Summer plans? What are your children most looking forward to this Summer? Feel free to chat more with me about Summer plans in the comments!
