Afterschooling – Our Plan for the Summer

I already shared that we won’t be homeschool this year as Raeca reaches the age for kindergarten, we’ve decided to send her to a private Christian school for this year but that doesn’t mean we won’t be educating her at home. Even this last year while she has been going to preschool two afternoons a week we’ve been doing what many have called afterschooling (or if you are Tsh, homeschool lite). Afterschooling is simply just homeschooling after school.

I thought I’d share a little bit today about how this has looked for us in the last few months and a bit of my plan for summer.

Oh yes, you read that right. One of my favorite things about homeschool (and afterschooling) is the fact that you have the opportunity to do it all year round, of you course you still take breaks but why take a whole two months off? Summer break often sets children back a few months so if you continue schooling through the summer (even with a lighter load), come the fall you won’t have to reteach a lot of concepts. Also, as I’ve shared before, I’m a huge fan of the Charlotte Mason homeschooling method and she includes a lot of time in nature, and here in Saskatchewan we get a lot more opportunity to do that in the summer!

So our summer plan is going to be on the light side and include a lot of time outdoors but I plan on being intentional about the things that I teach Raeca.

There are a few areas we’ve been focusing on in the last few months and will continue throughout the summer. We try to fit each of these in every work day, following Jared’s schedule (he works five days one week, four the next, with the odd day off, meaning in the summer we’ll average four days of intentional learning each week with a week or two off for some family camping time).

The things we will be focusing on:

READING LESSONS
I have very casually been teaching Raeca to read over the last year using the book How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, if people are interested I can share more thoughts on the book but in summary; it’s repetitive and not always fun but it really truly works. The last lesson Raeca completed was number 56 and this is what she was reading:

The lessons are supposed to take 20 minutes with a written component in there as well, it takes us about that long and we don’t do the writing component (Rae initiates writing a lot so I don’t feel it’s something we need to be too intentional about right now), it would probably take us a lot less time if Raeca told less stories in between words. 🙂 If we did a lesson every day that Jared worked we’d be done the book before the end of July but since I’m sure things will come up my goal is for us to complete the book by the end of August. The book has a complete script for parents and is super easy to use, I’d highly recommend it.

MATH
Right now we are just working on printing her numbers and basic addition and subtraction and shapes. This summer we will be working with different manipulatives as well.

MEMORY VERSES
We are working on learning at least one verse a month right now. My favorite thing to do so far is find a song on YouTube to go along with the verse we are memorizing. It makes it so easy for her. We listen to the song a few times throughout the day and I randomly ask her to tell me how much of the verse she knows and I’m always amazed with how much she just picks up.

READ ALOUDS
I do a lot of reading out loud to both the kids. We read picture books, chapter books and listen to audio books. Often I’ll read to the kids while they are having a snack or lunch and then I’ll eat after or if I eat at the same time as them, I’ll turn on whichever audio book we are currently listening to.

TIME IN NATURE
This is something I want to get a bit better at. Since it has been nice out we’ve spent a decent amount of time outside but we often go to the park because it is so close and both my kids love the swings and slides. And while that’s great I want to increase the time that they are just in nature with grass and trees and bugs and dirt. We will be planting our garden soon so that will give us something to do in our yard (one of the downfalls of owning a new home is starting your yard from scratch in the spring). I also want to start a nature journal with Raeca where hopefully at least once a week she will draw something she saw outside and label it.

**For anyone who is wondering where Ephraim is during this, he’s around, play toys, asking for food, trying to sing along to the verse, asking for food, listening to stories, asking for food (see a trend here?), copying words that Raeca says . . . right now we are working on teaching him the ABC’s and counting to 10, Rae loves to work with him on those.

I’d love to hear from you,
have you heard of afterschooling before?
is it something you do with you children? or would like to do?
do you have any favorite resources or pearls of wisdom to share?
anything else you’d like me to expand on?