Summer Group Studies - 2025
What our CM homeschool looks like when the AO lists are set aside.
Boys and girls, come out to play,
The moon does shine as bright as day,
Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And meet your playfellows in the street;
Come with a whoop, and come with a call,
And come with a good will, or not at all.
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A halfpenny loaf will serve us all.
You find milk and I'll find flour,
And we'll have a pudding in half an hour.
The elderberries are blooming and the online discussion groups have been wrapped up; summer has begun. Homeschooling certainly doesn’t cease in summer, but it looks a good bit different. I like to use this opportunity to run through a “reflection and refresh” (currently using this wonderful list from Lisa over at Patterns for Life) and lean into whatever stands out. This year, summer priorities look like…
Encountering the Real - Hours of time in every day with no writing, no read-alouds, no movies, no phone calls, no projects, no group studies. Space to notice and appreciate and form relationships with the real creatures and rhythms around us, with no expectations. Time to watch how shadows move and rain falls and light play, to learn where the insects wander and what face your sister makes when she’s happy, to notice when the chickens like to lay their eggs and watch how intrusive fledglings are. Time to experiment with tending to the responsibilities of everyday life in new ways, for rearranging bedrooms and organizing bookshelves and managing the poultry. Lots of late nights and early mornings, plenty of long walks and days at the lake and little garden plots to tend.
Times Tables and other math facts - Skip counting, games, challenges, songs, math wrap-ups, etc. Math lessons have been dragging out with excruciating slowness each time we encounter long division, subtraction, etc. If we can speed up our recall before August, perhaps the entire process will move along with a bit more competence.
Music - Rather than following the AO rotations like we do during the school year, I like to spend a few months enjoying music just because it’s near and dear to me. We’re listening to the work of Scott Joplin and Ferde Grofe, learning all the Mother Goose canons from The Singing Family, and refreshing our Solfa knowledge while singing every hymn that we know from our hymnbook.
Drawing - I haven’t yet gone through Drawing with Children with my littlest two, so this is the summer when that gets to happen. Lessons are ready, but we’ll wait until the heat kicks in before making serious progress.
Enunciation - Each child has a book that they read aloud from. Winnie the Pooh for one, McGuffey’s Fifth Reader for another, and Walter Buehr’s The French Explorers in America for the third.
Science - We did not get to any of the experiments from Physics Lab in the Home last year with my Year 4 student, so he gets to involve all of us as he directs one of these each week.
Life Skills - Sourdough bread keeps showing up and I’m not the one making it happen. Need I say more? Also, three weeks of art classes mean three weeks of packed lunches, and this year they’re fully responsible for packing their own.
Read-Alouds - Robert Fagles translation of The Aeneid is in progress as part of our always-running Epic Poetry loop, Fabre’s Life of the Spider, only halfway finished by my Year 7 student, has been added to our group stack because it’s just that good, and for pure fun and delight, we have Gene Stratton Porter’s Laddie, which meshes beautifully with our main purpose of encountering real things.
Sometimes we’ll gather in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening. Sometimes we’ll Do Things during one part of the day and we’ll Read Things during another part. Somedays we won’t get to anything on this list and some days we’ll do all of them. But a list like this serves us well by helping to keep us from defaulting to entertainment.