School’s Out!

We officially ended our school year on Friday. Then we counted…108 days until we officially start again on September 8th.  We try to take Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day weekend as our Summer break.  You’ll notice I said, “officially.”  That’s because we never stop learning. We are “officially” finished with this year so the kids can say that they are now in the next grade but…we never stop learning.

Actually, it could be argued that, even though Iowa’s homeschool law only requires 148 days, we homeschool 365 days a year. Would there ever be a day when we didn’t learn something? Now I’ll admit that we don’t learn as much on some days as others but we do learn something. And I know that despite the fact that we are not “doing school” for the next 108 days, we will be learning a lot in the area of nutrition. We won’t be using textbooks or taking tests to see what we know but we will be learning about healthy eating and about how our bodies use the foods that we consume but I plan to go into more detail about that in another post.

We’ll also be reading for the summer reading program at the public library.  A couple of my boys are learning to play the guitar and another one is learning computer programming.  We will spend time taking walks around the pond in the park behind our house and when we come home we will get out the bird book and the bug book and look up the different critters we saw on our walk. One of my sons will likely draw pictures of what he’s seen as well.  We might listen to bird calls on the computer and try to identify those little, feathered fellows that hid from us and only gave us clues to their identity through their songs. Then there are those rainy days when we will be inside. We’ll spend those days reading, watching movies, cooking up something in the kitchen or playing a game or two. We might get out the art supplies and see what we can create.

So you see, we are only “officially” done with school for the record. We are never really done….the kids just don’t know it!

Happy learning,

–Sheryl