Back 2 School

Posted on July 20, 2009

We are going to slowly crawl back into school over the next couple of weeks. I am having the kids do one or two subjects a day. I don’t want to overwhelm them or rob them of the end of the summer… but I am so ready to get back into a schedule. I have to admit that I am not a huge fan of summer vacation. I am always ready for the break at the end of the school year, but I wish we could school year round with random weeks off during the year. The long break kills me.

The kids were with their Nana and Opa Monday, Tuesday and part of Wednesday. Thursday I decided we would start back with one class. I thought it might be easier for the kids to get into the rhythm by slowly ramping up school. We will add a class a week. During the school year the kids are supposed to keep up a certain percentage of school work done a month. I will not be reporting any of our summer work until after school starts. This will buy us days off for field trips, lazy days, and doctor days.

I have to say I was really surprised at what we lost over the summer. I am normally really big on doing Summer Bridge books, or keeping some sort of school work going. This is the first time that we have taken this amount of time off. When we started back Thursday I was taken aback by the loss of some of the skills. The kids started off where we had finished last year and they still needed a lot of help.  It seems the trips to the library, reading tons of books, and a bunch of National Geographic videos are not enough… lol. Lesson learned.. next year we will go back to the Summer Bridge books, or school year round.

We did manage to keep our normal wake up time over the summer. This will be one less battle as we work our way back into a school time schedule. The kids have continued to take Piano lessons, and Alyssa is still taking Choi Kwang Do. I hope to get a schedule worked out we can all be happy about in the next week or so. The kids seem to thrive on a schedule. James in particular really likes to be in control of his time and not get told every five minutes what to do. I think putting the schedule in his hands gives him a feeling of power. He can figure out what to do on his own.

I hope to add in a few more field trips this year. I was a little overwhelmed last year. I made sure that the kids got to go to most of the fun field trips. We made it to a lot of park and skate days. I would like to add some of the educational trips in this year. I am really going to try to take advantage of some of the on-line Elluninate sessions (on-line classes) this year. We skipped them last year and I think the kids might enjoy learning from someone other than me every once in a while.

I am excited about all that this year will bring. Seeing the kids CRCT results from last year has confirmed that I in fact did not manage to dumb them down. We are safe for another year. (:

I would love to hear what kind of schedule you keep with your home school/virtual school crew.  I still need to figure out where/how to fit in chores, quiet time, school work, piano practice, etc..