Slowly, summer comes to an end

Getting ready to enter our fourth year, I realize that homeschooling has really brought a whole different perspective to our summers. As this summer trickles to an end and I get ready to go back to work July 28th, I'm feeling reflective of how fast time is passing and how much things have changed in our lives over the past few years. I can feel the kid getting older by the second and becoming more independent and more mature. With a side dose of sass for good measure. 

I've been very frank with my readers that we never intended to homeschool. It wasn't even an option on the table when the kid started kindergarten. But heading into our fourth year, I wonder how different life would have been those first few years if we'd been homeschooling all along? I'm grateful for the wonderful teachers he met along his short school journey. I'm even grateful for the total dud that drove us to homeschooling, because she forced us to make a choice and to face the facts that we were simply asking a school system designed for the masses to take on too much of an individual.  I'm also very cognizant of the reality that our experiences shape who we become, and that we may be very different people without those first few years of school under our family's collective belt. 

Nearly every day, someone asks us what the kid will do for high school. I've heard from other homeschooling families that this questioning dies down over time. Perhaps it's our own unique situation, but the closer we get to high school age, the more this comes up, not less. The truth is, that decision day seems as far away as the day we decided to homeschool for "just one year". It's not that I don't think about it, because I do, but I can't come to grips with making that decision right now or even in the somewhat near future. It seems an impossible choice- take the finally happy, finally academically and emotionally satisfied kid and introduce an unknown, or delay the unknown for another four years until college. Is there a middle ground on the unknown that seems both satisfactory and interesting enough to take the risk? If there is, we haven't found it yet.

One week left of summer and I have serious lesson planning to tackle. There are units to be divided, science lab material to purchase and lit units to write (or borrow/copy/edit from my best friend Google). Yet the last week of summer is begging me for a backyard campout, a day at the pool, one last PJ day and cookies to be baked. I know I'm feeling sentimental about it all because the kid is getting bigger and far less interested in my big plans for the week. He'd rather play on the computer, mess around with friends and finish his stack of fun reading. 

Like the lurking high school decision, I'm putting away all those work plans for one more week. I'm going to let this last week of summer just wash over us both, filling us with fresh baked cookies, the smell of sunscreen and one last snuggle on the couch while we watch a movie. We'll figure out the future in August. 

 

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?