Summertime Schooling - Home Schooling During the Summer Months

One of the wonderful things about being a home schooling family is the flexibility to choose how, what and even when you want to teach your children. Because of this, many home school families continue their schooling throughout the summer months, when public schools have summer break. Unfortunately, because of the societal standard of a "summer break", some home school families reduce the studying or eliminate it all together during the warmer months. So the style and intensity of home schooling during the summer may vary quite a bit. However there are many ways to keep your family learning through the summer - without them even knowing they are in school!

One of the largest benefits to home schooling in summer is the opportunity to bring the learning outside, and incorporate environmental studies into the curriculum. Botany, Biology, Physical Education, and other sciences are ideal for teaching during the summer months. And another fantastic benefit of continuing summertime education is also the ability to help the ecosystem in the process.

Encourage your children to learn about the world around them, the world that is normally covered in snow and ice during usual school months. Here are a few activities and questions you may use to learn about the world during the summer*.

Find a line of ants and rub your finger across their trail. What happens? Can you figure out why?

Find out where your house's water comes from. Does your town have its own well, or take water from a reservoir or river? If your water comes from a reservoir or river, does the water seem clean to you, and free of chemical pollutants? Are you content with your water situation? If not, what are you going to do about it?

Figure out where your trash goes. The garbage truck picks it up, and then... ? Is anything recycled? Is it dumped at sea or burned, causing air pollution, or put into a landfill, using valuable land? Are you happy with what happens to it? Is there anything you can do to improve the matter?

If you have a microscope, look at pollen grains of different flowers and notice how different they are from one another in terms of size and shape.

These are just some of the many different activities available to you and your home school family during the summertime! Get creative and encourage "fun in the sun" while learning about the world around you and how you can make that world a better place.

Every home schooling family has a different style and approach to learning. Whether you take a more traditional approach, or a laid-back relaxed approach, you can integrate learning with the warm summer months to give your children with the best education that you can provide as well as an opportunity to learn about the environment and help the ecosystem with "going green" activities.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to teach your children more about the world around them, yet help them to grow into responsible adults by encouraging recycling, energy-efficiency, and conservation efforts? Even though summertime is traditionally a time of fun in the sun in our culture, that doesn't mean the learning has to stop, and you can encourage your entire family to take part in these activities!

One of the other advantages to continuous home schooling throughout the year is the ability to take more frequent, yet shorter, breaks throughout the year. Because of this, you can schedule these breaks around holidays, birthdays, recitals or other special events. Additionally, with the inclusion of summer home schooling, there is a reduced need for an intensive fall review, as the learning hasn't ceased. Because of the more evenly spaced breaks throughout the year, you will also have less burnout, more confidence and increased retention of material.

With all of these advantages, you can see how home schooling during the summer helps not only your family, but the environment as well.

* Suggested activities above were taken from 101 Nature-Oriented Things to Do During the
Summer at http://www.backyardnature.net/101/summer.htm - we recommend looking there for many more fun educational environmental activities for the home schooling family.

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About the Author: Stephanie Davies is a WAHM from Mid-Missouri. She loves to read, write, knit, watch movies, build websites and surf the internet. Her website at http://www.hostingwahms.com provides website hosting and other online services to work at home parents. She recommends Christian Work At Home Moms http://www.faithfulgrannies.com as a great online source for home schoolers.