Saturday, July 5, 2014

Summer Curriculum

Here's a look at our plans over the summer in regards to school.

Because we homeschool I, of course, plan to lock the kids in closets all summer and beat them with books. We can't have them socializing, now can we?! Ok, so maybe I've heard the S word too often lately lol Here's what's really going on.

Brianna has a zillion activities as usual! She's doing a science camp next week and a sewing camp in August. Brianna also goes swimming at a local outdoor pool with friends most afternoons. Olivia would have joined soccer this year, but the only group that allowed 4 year olds was almost an hour away, so we'll wait til next year.

Brianna also does a Park Leaders program at the neighbourhood park Tues-Fri mornings. Olivia even gets to join her this year! Unfortunately this is officially Brianna's last year, but I'm hoping since our park has a small group that she can be allowed to go with Olivia for a couple more years, even if it's only as a "helper".


Brianna and Olivia both joined the Read to Ride program with the library. In exchange for giving weekly oral book reports to the librarians, they get a sticker on their library cards that allows them on the city buses free (with an adult for Olivia!). Brianna loves it because she can go to the library any time without worrying about the heat and humidity (the library is quite a hike away) and Olivia just loves the bus!

Both girls ran a fun run today (which also happens to be Brianna's birthday!). Olivia is over the moon, thrilled for another race! It's all she talked about all week. Brianna has her 4th triathlon next month. She really needs to step up the pace in her training if she wants to beat her time from last year. She has great plans to do training and then forgets them quickly lol We're working on figuring out some kind of schedule for her to follow that works around the heat but still gets her running at least a few times a week.


As for actual school:

Brianna and I are doing a joint writing project. Each day we add to a story. Just 10 minutes of writing for each of us. Brianna thinks it's great both because it's something we're doing together, but also because it only requires 10 minutes of writing (she has a lot of issues putting thoughts to paper so "hates" writing). We've only been at it a few days, but it's fun so far. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what to write after Brianna's sometimes scrambled line of thought, but by reading what I write, she's also (without realizing it) learning proper writing style, grammar, punctuation, ect...


I'm also throwing spelling review at her once a week or so. Which, while I find it tedious, appears to be working as he spelling has *greatly* improved over the last couple of months. What ever works, eh?

Normally we'd slow down drastically in the math department, but Brianna wants to "catch up" her math as she's a year "behind". So we're working our way through Math Mammoth's Gr. 6 curriculum over the summer. I certainly don't expect her to finish it in 2 mths, but by doing a regular amount of pages rather than our summer amount of pages, she'll get a great head start.

We are still doing our country studies but we'll spread it over 2-3 weeks instead of cramming everything into 1 week. I had considered stopping them for the summer but as soon as we were winding down with Iceland, Brianna was harassing me about what our next country was. So we'll continue.

Olivia is in Kindergarten so already has quite the watered down schedule. To be honest, I do school with her whenever she asks for it or I think to ask her if she wants to do some. This works out to be, on average, 1-3 times a week. As she's still technically "ahead" if she was in public school, I'm not worried.

Over the summer, we're working on telling time, calendars, drawing shapes and convincing her to write her name more often. We'll also be working on making sure she's got all of her letters down, capital and lowercase and start working more on letter sounds.


Hip Homeschool Moms

No comments:

Post a Comment