Planning for summer

As a homeschooler, you'd expect that summer looks a lot like the rest of the school year. However, as a charter school student, we have specific requirements during the school year that we have to meet including attendance, work samples and meetings. We follow a traditional school year calendar and therefore, summers are free!

I remember the joyous feeling of summer as a kid- the long hours playing in the empty field near my house, creating crazy projects with my brother and getting into piles of trouble for seeing them through. We learned the hard way one summer,  that you cannot actually ride the garage door all the way to the top on the garage door opener's little motor. We spent hours on our bikes, reading books and just hanging out.

Summer in the 21st Century doesn't really look like that anymore, at least not in my big city. Kids don't wander the streets looking for friends. There's no such thing as unscheduled time or just free play around the neighborhood. I'd LOVE to be a free range mom, but there are few other free rangers close enough for my kid to even know what that means.

So we're back to making summer plans and figuring out what to do for those long, hot summer days. While I don't limit screentime per se, a summer filled of skype and Minecraft is more than I can handle. The kid can't possibly sit at the computer 10 hours a day- though he'd try if I let him.

Summer is a little intimidating as a homeschooler because suddenly my 24 hours a day shadow has no plans. No lessons to complete, no goals to accomplish. It often sounds like this instead "Mom! Mom! Mom! What can I do now? Can I get back on the computer? What are you doing? Can I do it with you? I'm bored." We have a running list called "25 things you can do before you ask me what to do" and it hangs on the wall right by his desk.

I have two goals for each summer that I like to accomplish- 1) Maintaining my sanity and 2) Sparking some creative, passionate buzz in the kid- somehow, some way! This summer's plan to maintain my sanity has two weeks of sleep-away camp at two different places, includes a week at the beach for me and a week of day camp where I go back to work and the kid has fun. If I can nail down a bunch of projects at work before the school year begins, we'll be in a better place come August.

For sparking some kind of creative passion, we're still not so sure where to go with that. I'm hoping a week at camp might get him fired up. He's thinking a mod design class in Minecraft is the solution. Maybe we'll find a happy medium and do both.

What are your summer plans?