So a couple of summers ago we started a tradition of a “home
school summer school.” Basically the way it works is that before the kids can
go out to play they need to do three hours of summer school. They can set their
schedule for what they do each day. Some things are required (piano, math,
writing), other things are optional (e.g., geography) and
because our kids love to read so much, reading does not count. Lest
you think we are mercenaries, we did do tennis lessons and counted that as “PE.”
The kids make themselves a schedule and I make a chart to track their progress
(they get to move forward one space on a little game board for every successful
day of homeschool, receiving prizes along the way (mom, you know where I got
that idea!)).
This summer has probably been our most successful homeschool
ever. The kids decided that they didn’t want to get robbed of their playtime
and so they have been getting up at 6:00 most mornings to get an early start on
homeschool. This has the great benefit of helping them to be tired out around
8:30 or 9:00 so we don’t have as many problems with late summer nights! There
is something great about getting up early in the morning. The kids have had
much more focused scripture study and journal time, and for the most part,
everyone has stuck to their schedule. We’ve had a lot of fun with Khan Academy,
Geography Quizzes and MindSnacks (Chinese and Spanish). We also bought a workbook for each kid and used math worksheets and letter tracing when we got desperate for activities (letter tracing only for Joseph and Katrina) :).
Part of the summer school plan is accomplishing at least one
really hard thing. I love what Clayton Christensen wrote in How Will YouMeasure Your Life: “Self-esteem – the sense that “I’m not afraid to confront
this problem and I think I can solve it” – doesn’t come from abundant
resources. Rather, self-esteem comes
from achieving something important when it’s hard to do.”
I sat down with each child at the start of the summer and
invited them to pick one really hard thing that they wanted to do and we tied
the “big prize” at the end of the summer chart to not only doing home school
each morning, but also accomplishing the hard thing.
Levi wrote an awesome book called Journey to Oregon. We were able to go to BYU’s Y Mountain Press to
see it actually get published.
It’s an awesome book about a family’s adventures on the
trail west.
Annemarie also took on a big writing task. A couple of years
ago she wrote a short book as part of
her summer school challenge. This year she decided to translate that book into
Chinese (she has been in the Chinese immersion program for four years). She put
an incredible amount of consistent and focused effort (including about 20 hours
in the past two weeks). With help from her Uncle Cameron, she finished this
week!
Annemarie plans to print out the book like Levi did, and has
also made it available as a Kindle book. Regardless of how many sales it gets,
I think it has built her self-esteem because she’s done something hard.
Maria and Joseph are still working on their hard things and I’m
sure they will accomplish them. All in all it has been a great summer of summer
school!
