With less than a month left in the school year, I have decided to scrap the remainder of my lesson plans and have a fun and relaxed end of the homeschool year. The last couple of weeks in public school are always a joke anyway, right?
The Child Thing finished her Pre-K reading curriculum long ago and is more than half way through with the Kindergarten curriculum, so this isn't going to cause her to get behind. And to be perfectly honest, I think both of us were kind of getting bored with the routine and not having fun anymore. So...no more phonics and no more structured lessons.
For the last few weeks we are going to learn about the 7 continents and be very relaxed about it. I intend to spend 3 days or so on each continent, and here's what I have in mind:
Day 1: Read a short exerpt from What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know about whatever continent we're studying. Color map of continent. Color any other appropriate pictures. I found free printable coloring pages and maps for all of the continents at http://www.coloring.ws/coloring.html
Day 2: More Coloring Pages, animal sticker book (which groups animals by continent), cut out images from magazines that apply to our continent, read library books about/set in our continent
Day 3: Combine all cut out/colored images onto a poster to make a continent collage. Watch a movie set in our continent.
I'm hoping this laid back approach to our last few weeks of homeschool will break the routine some and restore the joy of learning, so that we are fresh and ready to go next year. I suppose this end-of-year burnout is normal. I was never homeschooled, but I know I sure felt that way by the time the last month or so of school got there. Any knowledge or advice on the end-of-year blues?
2 comments:
I'm no help because I don't stick to a traditional school year schedule. We do school all year round taking ample breaks here and there. When someone's sick, we don't do school til everyone's well. When the weather is perfect (you know, for those 2 months in Texas) most school gets abandoned to play outside. I TRY to start the new grade relatively when real school starts, but it's just a guideline. For instance, Natalie is a little more than 3/4 done with her work for the year, but we'll keep going through the summer (when we actually do the most school because it's too hot to do anything else lol). I get burned out really easily, so this structure works really well for me.
Many of our friends change thier year to homeschool during the heat of the summer when it is too hot to play outside. My DIL times her year around tax season since her husband is an accountant. I think a relaxed end of the year is just the reward for a year well done.
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