Mini Vacation
We’ve only been doing school for a couple of years as my guys are still fairly young, but my preference is still to school year-round. I just don’t see any real reason to arbitrarily stop in the summer, especially since we live in an area where we can fry an egg on the sidewalk in July and August. In fact, I never really thought about taking a break at all. School doesn’t take us all that long and it just didn’t seem necessary to me until a discussion in a recent homeschool group meeting. They were talking about summer break and how good it is for kids to have a break to look forward to. I had never really thought about it that way, but it makes sense. No matter how much they enjoy it, school work is still work and just having a break to look forward to can make the days of school work seem less endless.
So, since we don’t take a break in the summer, I decided to tell Big J that when he finished the Alpha book of MathUSee he could have a two week break from school. It gave him some extra momentum at the end of the book and we’re enjoying some lazy days just playing, staying in our jammies until… well… whenever! I think doing this for more than about 2 weeks would not be great though. I miss the structure that schoolwork gives to our days and I think the boys do too.
What about you? Do you take a summer break, or do you take mini-breaks throughout the year?
We take breaks whenever we want to or need to, like that vacation to Florida in March, when all the public school kids are in school! Talk about short lines at Universal Studios. Some years we spend 3 weeks in Hong Kong and that is a break for my girls but not for me! But we don’t schedule summers off. We stick to it, right through summer, except for mini-breaks here or there.
We have never taken a whole summer off. But we do an abbreviated schedule in the summer, only 4 or 5 subjects or so. What we do depends on where we are in each subject. But I’ve found the last few years that the breaks are just as much for me as for Isaac!