Our summer plans

For our children one of the few downsides to homeschooling is that there is no clear break from schooling to summer vacation. In public schools there is a “last day of school.” After that day school is all over and summer vacation starts.

For our children the transition from schooling to summer vacation is ranges from a fairly clear transition to a slow wind down. Our six-year-old son will have a traditional last day of school. We’ll go from our kindergarten routine of an hour or two of schooling each day to a fairly true vacation where we'll let him play much of the summer.

But at the other extreme our second daughter will be winding up school for several weeks. She finished up her American Sign Language class last Wednesday. Her junior college history class finishes up this Friday. Then over the next couple weeks she will wrap up her online high school courses and her Saxon Math. She will gradually slip into summer vacation.

Our third daughter will be kind of in-between. Once she is done with her online courses she’ll be mostly done, but we do plan to have her do Saxon Match through the summer. She is struggling a bit with math and we want to make sure she masters the subject.

We don’t give our children three months of play time in the summer, especially as they become teenagers. We want them to be doing useful things, they just don’t have to be classical academic endeavors. I’ll have our daughters read some useful books and I’m thinking of leading them through a programming class. My father has suggested Udacity’s Python class, which I still need to check out.