It’s May! For many homeschoolers, this is the time of year when you’re wrapping everything up and looking forward to a summer break. For me, this is the time of year when we’re just getting started.

I didn’t intentionally set out to be contrary, it just sort of happened. I knew we would not take a months-long break at any point during the year, because from my own experience I just felt like you lose too much information in that time. So my plan was for us to take more, shorter breaks throughout the year and do a sort of year-round school. However, what ended up happening was that we do the bulk of our lessons in the summer and take a lot more breaks in the fall and winter.

Why Summer School?

My favorite thing about homeschooling is the freedom it allows us. Freedom to explore interests, freedom to travel, and freedom to teach on our own schedule. For us, summer is the perfect time to teach for many reasons.

First, and maybe this is antisocial of me, the world gets a whole lot more crowded during summer. With all the schools out, this means all the kids that are normally in this schools are out and about in the world. Of course, I think that’s AWESOME for them, but I prefer to visit the Children’s Museum, Zoo, parks, and libraries when they’re a little quieter. So we save up our field trips for the fall when school is in session, and spend more time at home during the summer.

Not only are there less trips to the zoo for us during the summer, but we also have less commitments. Co-ops and enrichment classes tend to work on the academic calendar. It is really hard for me to get lessons done when we have so many other places to go during the week. During the academic school year, there are weeks when we only have one or two days at home. Of course, my kids are still getting an education by being out at their other classes, but as far as sticking to a schedule and getting full lessons completed? It’s really, really hard for us to do that in the fall and spring. I take advantage of our summer months to really delve into our chosen curricula, because we have the time to explore it, complete all the lessons, and enjoy our time, rather than trying to squeeze it in in the hour before or after whatever extracurriculars we have going on that day.

Also? It’s HOT. I’m all about Spring. I’m good up to mid-80s. But summer, when it’s like one hundred degrees outside? No thank you. Unless we’re in the water, we’ll just stay in the nice air conditioned house. Since we’re hiding in the AC anyway, again, it’s the perfect time to work!

And, last but not least, there’s more hours in the day. I mean, I know there’s not literally. But the longer the sun is out, the more we’re happy and motivated. I love waking up to the sun early in the morning. Summer is the one time of year I am up early and ready to go. I need to use this extra energy to get some learning done! By winter, I’d much rather just stay in my warm bed all day.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I turn into a hermit from June to September. We still take advantage of special events, we still spend time with our friends (especially the friends who are in traditional school or work on that schedule), we still play outside and have water balloon fights. But we are able to plan these things in such a way that they are minor interruptions to our school schedule, as opposed to the constant busyness that is Fall and Spring.

Our schedule is definitely an odd one. We school from May to mid-August. At that point we’ll take about six weeks off of our regular schedule, because that’s when both of the boys’ birthdays fall, when we vacation, and when enrichment programs and field trips start back up. Between November and February, when the weather is cold, we spend more time at home and will be at the books again. March and April we’ll be back out for field trips and fun stuff again.

Of course, mine isn’t an exact science. I’m a pretty laid back homeschooler. I don’t have dates and times marked down as to when we are definitely sitting at our desks working. We’ll subtract and add days as we need to. If we’re working on some really interesting stuff, I’m not going to stop in the middle just because it happens to be March now. But my point is, we work around the weather and crowds. We do what works best for us, because we can. That’s the whole point of this gig.

What does your homeschool schedule look like? What have you found works best for your family?