Summer School & A Summer Baby

We are so excited about adding a new baby to our family this summer. It seems like perfect timing as far as staying on track with our lessons without it all being too stressful. It also made me wonder how other homeschool moms do it all during the summer. Do you school year round? Do you choose just a few things to keep the kids fresh? Or do you use your summer to just have fun? What do you do when you are expecting a new baby?

Generally we homeschool year round. Instead of taking a long summer break we usually take frequent breaks during the year, it helps us prevent burn out. But since this summer we are expecting a new baby , I have been thinking that it would be good to take a little more of a break. We aren’t going to completely stop doing lessons. Every summer we do a math facts memorization and refresher course and I feel like the kids math skills would slip without it. We don’t do any other math. We just focus on facts. We do flashcards and math minutes and online games to help reinforce it all. The other thing we would like to do this summer is an intensive geography course. We use The Story of the World as our main history/ geography curriculum but the kids have shown a huge interest in learning the geography of the world. We figured summer would be a good time to pause from our regular curriculum and do this. I haven’t found anything that fits what I am looking for so I am going to develop my own (which I will be sharing on here) using books that I like and blank maps. The kids are begging to continue doing science so we are thinking about letting them do the Switched on Schoolhouse program for that. We will stop lessons a couple weeks before the baby is born and then continue them once everything has settled down. Our regular school schedule will start in early August.

I have been encouraging the kids to work extra hard to complete this year’s curriculum before the summer begins. I also needed enough time before the baby gets here to plan for next year. We have planned our spring break as an 8 day trip to Disneyland as our last “family of 7″ trip. Talk about motivation!