Homeschooling Mama to 7 on earth, 2 in heaven: Homeschooling Adventures: "Summer School"

Summer doesn't look a whole lot different for us except we have more activities with friends who are off for the summer and, of course, pool time! We are more relaxed as far as school stuff goes but there is definitely a lot of learning going on, no less that during the typical school year! Big news though, our first year of high school was a success!*I think*

I thought this week was a good example of some typical summer days for us:

One day after everyone woke up we read aloud at breakfast, currently our read aloud book is The Hidden Gallery (The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place book 2) then a couple of the kids worked on math until it was time to get ready for the pool. After swimming and lunch we all gathered around in the living room and my 11 year old read Aesop's Fables, after reading one she had someone narrate it, then for each fable she had the younger kids (ages 10, 9, 7 and 6) write on a dry erase board what they thought the moral or lesson of the story was, then we would discuss it. Bonus with this was that any words that were misspelled were added to their spelling list.

Another day on our morning walk we spotted a turtle in the middle of the road that we rescued from getting run over! The kids studied it up close then a couple of them came home and drew or wrote about it in our Nature journal.

My oldest son is very interested in clocks, it started out as a Big Ben obsession in which he read about Big Ben, built it countless times out of Lego's, drew it, painted it, etc. Then he started wanting to see other clock towers, went to the library and found books about how clocks worked and started taking apart old watches. My grandpa happens to work at a clock repair shop so we set up a visit there this week for the boys which further sparked his interest. Now he is researching different types of clocks from the past.

I love this kind of self-delighted, self-directed learning...to me, this is what unschooling and homeschooling is suppose to look like...following your child's lead, facilitating, providing them the information, tools, whatever it is, for them to learn what they are craving to know.

It's not always that "easy", sometimes they don't seem to have any big interests that leads to wanting them to know more, do something, etc. When it does happen though I always try to support it in whatever way I can.

Something that my 14 year old(almost 15 EKKK!) and 11 year are really into right now is sign language, the 3 of us started taking an ASL class and then we come home and teach everyone else what we learn. They are LOVING this!

Currently 5 of the kids are making parachutes with plastic bags, yarn and Lego men, I love their creativity! We may not have finished our curriculum for the year but there's no way I would stop their play!

P.S. We use My Father's World curriculum, which I love because it is a mixture of Charlotte Mason's ideas, unit study's, biblical, hand's on and multiple ages at once, but we very loosely follow it since it is also important to me for the kids to have time to study what they are interested in when those obsessions emerge!