Do you school September through May? Or year around? Or something all together different? I think I want to follow the regular calender. I can't decide what it best though..I've always heard kids forget a lot of things over the summer break. On the other hand I myself enjoy being a beach bum in the summer, lol.
We do homeschool through the summer because we take a lot of days off during the winter (when the weather here is actually usually pretty nice) to go play in a park or visit the zoo, or just fun errands. We make up for those days in June and July and August when it is 95+° with 98+% humidity and we didn't want to be outside anyway! LOL Having said that, yeah, there's usually a little information retention loss over the summer, but most curricula have some review built in the beginning of the year to help get the kids back on track. You can add more if you need to. Go be a guilt-free beach bum! Don't forget the sunblock!
We do school from september to first week in June. It gets hot in the summers here and I don't want to be confined to air conditioning, Id rather be beach buming it too! My kids like camping and stuff in summers, we do 'feild trip' learning and remind them that way of things they may need, but hey, it works for me! Occasionally if we are not done when me, the teacher needs a break we save it for a week or two in summer. This year I am alreayd booked up for the summer days so school will not be an option. We have two camps, camping for family camp plus Jr Giants Baseball... Plus my nephew may stay a m onth or so with us, and we will need to tak ehim to all the stuff todo in this area. yep we will put in much beachh time in the camps we go to too! Plus beach time in between!
I thought I was going to school year round, taking lots of smaller breaks whenever we needed them ore felt like it, but I am coming to the conclusion that the kids and I are going to need a longer break. Even though they don't have any ties to the public school they have head about summer vaccation and want one, LOL. But we will go a little later into the summer than the local schools and probably start a bit earlier, so that we can still take some little breaks.
Ok, here is my take on it... When I was little I went to a year around school. I loved it, we would go a few weeks and have a week or 2 off, go a few more weeks and have some more off. It was great. Then we moved to PA, where they school from the end of August to the beginning of June... it was ok, but then every September we would spend reviewing everything from the year before. Now for me and my family. We have 3 Christmas babies in our house. It makes for a crazy December for us. We also have to follow a schedule of July 1st to June 31st as our school year for the state. So I came up with a plan... We start in mid July. We have some structured learning every weekday for 9 weeks, then we take a week off.. it ends up being midish Sept. We then have 9 more weeks of school which brings us up to the week of Thanksgiving. We take off all of Thanksgiving week and then all of December. We start back the first Monday after New Years (this is a 6 week break), and go 9 weeks. Again we get a week off, and go our final 9 weeks ending in mid May. We then have an 8 week summer break, which ends as we get tired of the heat and are ready to spend our days in air conditioning. It's not a super strict schedule.. like this year we worked through Dec and finished 2 weeks ago so we were good and done before baby comes in early May this year... and even on the days that we don't count.. like through December and through the 8 week summer break, we are always learning something.
Year round here. That way I don't have to feel too much pressure about skipping all those days when school just doesn't seem to get done. We generally take a "spring break" from mid april to mid june when the weather is nice and winter is finally over. I call it "short school". About 1/2 of what I generally require in a day.
I have been trying to come up with a slightly different schedule.. maybe a 6 weeks and 1 off kind of thing.. hmmmm wonder how it would work out. I want to find a way that we will be off when this new baby has his or her birthday every year.. like we are with all the other kids.
We generally start the first week of August (sometimes late July) and end the week before Memorial Day in May. We do "light" school days 1-2 times a week during the summer just to keep up math skills, reading, etc. We do our req'd testing in April so we can be more lax in May when the weathers nice and the pub school kids are still in school here in VA until mid-June. I personally wouldn't mind year round but my kids are prior Dept of Defense schooled kids and like the summer break even if it's shorter than some kids' breaks.
Us, too! Well, actually, two Christmas and a New Year's Day baby. I decided since we were already going to be different (just by homeschooling), we might as well make everything work for us. So, we start in Jan (whatever the first Monday after Jan 1 is) and school till we're done. Last year, that was the last week of October, although that was an artificial goal I set for myself, and created some stress to make it happen. Not this year. We'll school till we're done. I still set a weekly schedule of what I'd like us to get through, but we always seem to have interruptions - one set of grandperants showed up last week, another grandmother is coming in May (since we're far from them, a visit is a big deal - read interruption of regular life). Then, when we travel with DH, I usually lose at least one day between going and coming home...sometimes two. So this year, maybe we won't "finish" until Thanksgiving. Whatever. I'd rather we took our time, learned the material and weren't stressed about it. If we need a day to take off and swim in the lake, well, our mental health is important, too.
We pretty much school year round here. It works better for DD as she needs the continuity. Plus both kids really like playing outside in the winter, they love the snow!
Although I am a newbie here I will through my 2 cents in ... We homeschool year round but we take breaks when we need them. We try to take the same breaks the school does during the school year, but we also take our own breaks during that time. All-in-all we end up schooling for at least 200 days a year which is about 20 days over the required number of days in our area (Department of Defense School).
We started school June or July 9th. I think it was in July but I have to check my attendance to be sure. Anyways, I do not follow the traditional calender. We start when we are ready, always by August or September, and take time off whenever we need it. We are almost done with school this year. Ems already finished her English, reading, health, and she is almost done with math. Once she is done, we will take a couple or a few weeks off then start our new year.
The plan is to go year round and take breaks when and where we need it. Like last week completely fell apart because DS was sick and this week MIL is in the hospital and I'm sick. We will start back fresh on Monday.
I find that following our own schedule allows room for sick days and unexpected vacations. We took a little over a month off from Thanksgiving all the way through the new year. Since we planned in advance, we started school a lot earlier than usual. Then we took a last minute vacation to Colorado. Those two weeks were not planned but since we are on our own schedule, those days were already counted for.
Well, yes and no. I tried for years to go year-round, but found it too difficult with kids at camp for two weeks, my parents taking them a week, family vacation .... So I finally gave up on it. Now last summer, we had to finish history. (I spend too much time reading historical fiction; it really slows us down!). And Rachael needed to finish her science, so we did do some school. My husband teaches in a public school, so we pretty much follow his schedule.
I start our year the first week of August (after my birthday) and count our my required days. I do stuff year round, I just recieved our summer school projects. Critters and a commuity garden.
hmmmm....when I started we did year round. And last summer our evaluator told us to take the summer off...so we did. Getting back into the swing of things, though, was REALLY tough. So, this year we're going to keep going thru the summer....I'd say, 3 days a week we'll do Math, L/A, and Science (signed my kids up for Quick Study Labs free summer science club). My youngest will have handwriting too - he's still learning cursive and we've had to step back quite a bit b/c he's not getting the hang of it). I will be filing my affidavits WITH my portfolios so that I can start school on July 1 and any days we actually get enough in, I'll count towards our 180. I'm actually hoping we get enough in, that we can have a very relaxed December schedule.
Jackie arent you doing the Not grass world history next year? you will love it if youlove reading about history! back on thread--- we always have followed the ps type schedule, like I said before because it gets hot in summer here, but also because it was in grafted into my brain from child hood, I always wanted to be a teacher so I could have my summers off. So it seemed natural to me to take them off now.. I can remember all the freedom Ihad in summers as a kid, swimming pools are open only in summer here untless you have a club membership someplace so that is another reason. We do swim lessons etc each summer.
No, *I* am not using Notgrass; *Rachael* is, lol!!! She'll do it pretty much on her own. Yesterday at Staff Meeting at church, the gal that works with our youth had a CD of Martin Luther's "Here I Stand". I got all excited, because I knew it was something I hadn't got yet for Notgrass, and it looked SO interesting!!! Last night, the kids stayed up late and watched "Tora, Tora, Tora". Today we finished reading a book on Pearl Harbor (based on eye-witness accounts), and read through several scenes from the movie.
