Creating a summer fun-schooling plan

I mentioned on Monday in our May homeschool happenings I was eager to start our summer fun-schooling schedule as compared to our normal homeschooling schedule.  We did this concept last year, and it was a big hit.

But, there were things not working in our fun-schooling schedule.  Like, my big plans for cleaning and organization for the summer didn’t happen.

I think they forgot every single bit of math they learned over the summer.  That may be a slight exaggeration, but it felt like it.

I also felt like all of the fun things I wanted to do didn’t happen.  There’s a small local waterpark we barely went to last year.

(This post contains affiliate links)

Enter my:

New fun-schooling plan for summer

I came up with about 2 hours worth of work I want my kids to do each day:  1 hour of reading (20 minutes free reading, 20 minutes of our current book and a movie book, and 20 minutes of the Bible); 1 math assignment (1 chapter from Life of Fred), 1 handwriting page (because their handwriting has gotten horrible), 20 minutes of typing, and 1 extra chore a day.

Equipped with my new plan, I opened up my Illuminations scheduler and created a blank schedule with a square for each of those items.  Then I added in a fun-schooling subject, a random extra info subject, and a Special Events subject.

Future Ticia 2023 here, I no longer use Illuminations (I don’t know if Bright Ideas still sells it, they don’t), instead I would just make a super lazy weekly calendar with squares for each of these topics.

Now each day, the kids are responsible for their own schedule.  They can’t play until all of their required squares are done, and I’ve seen the checkmarks.  This has led to the boys waking up at 6:30 and starting on their schoolwork right away.  To be honest I have no problem with this.

Designing the Extra chores for the kids

I went with the super easy expedient of sitting down in different rooms and writing them on mini post-it notes that I folded in half.  Then I split up the chores into 3 different jars.  To give them a bit of extra incentive I sprinkled some extra fun things in their jars (no chore for you today, you can get ice cream).  I also included one bigger thing in each kids’ jar (go to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard, go get frozen yogurt, go to the local water park).

By the end of the week they have to complete 5 post-it notes.  I don’t care if they get them all done on Monday, or only do one each day, but they cannot leave all 5 for Friday, that’s almost a guarantee they won’t get them done.

I’ll be honest, I don’t always immediately get their work checked, but I”m usually pretty good about checking it.

Funs-chooling units

Our most successful fun-schooling unit last year was the Space Exploration week.  That was a HUGE hit.  This fall we did several weeks of European Explorers, which is the inspiration for my upcoming 31 Days of Explorers unit in October (I’ve got one more fun-schooling week to add to this).

What fun-schooling units do I have in plan for this summer?

• My Side of the Mountain (completed last week, it was highly messy and successful)
• Spanish Conquistadors (what we’re doing this week, provided Batman gets better, he had an upset stomach yesterday, which severely limited what we could do)
• Colonial America (I have enough material planned for a couple of weeks on this, I’m collecting natural materials to try natural dyes for cloth, fingers crossed)
• American Revolution (again a couple of weeks of material here)
• Inventors’ Week (Superman’s request, the only request of his that wasn’t super silly, I mean a cheese week or this random piece of trash I found week?????)
• The Ultimate Crafting Week (this is my plan while the boys’ are in summer camp to work on a bunch of the crafting badges with Wendy)
• Who knows what else, I’ve got a couple of single-day ideas for some picture books

If you follow me on Instagram expect to see lots of #funschooling posts on there, and if you’re doing some fun-schooling yourself make sure to tag your pictures so we can all share in the fun ideas.