Home School High School - Summer Time Learning, Homeschooling Style

By Author: Cliffton Ford
Total Articles: 4
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All through the summer, our family continued to do some educational activities for around an hour each day, to enable our sons to retain their skills between school years. At times we used this opportunity to fill a gap in their educations. We were cautious to make sure that whatever we did, it was something that would keep mom sane-it was important that I take a break over the summer! It was just as important that my boys had a chance to play during the summer, so we really tried to keep schoolwork to one or two hours a day, at the very most, leaving the rest of the day unstructured. This made it easier for us begin on the right foot with some review, but also permitted us to take some breaks over the summer.

Reading the newspaper or even a magazine during the summer is an excellent option to help your kids learn about current events and what’s taking place in the world. During the school year, agendas can get a little too busy to allow for this essential learning. Some students might enjoy keeping a journal in the summertime, as well. This has the extra benefit of improving their writing skills, and is a particularly ...
... fun idea if you’re doing travel of any kind, whether camping or going to some different section of the country. Your children could also take a class, perhaps in art or sports, or SAT prep over the summer. They can continue to learn something they’re interested in, while you as a parent get a break! Perhaps your children could be interested in joining some kind of club or maybe they want to do some volunteer work. As a side benefit, these things are really valuable for your student’s overall portfolio when they start applying to colleges.

Whenever you do summer school, don't forget to consider providing your child credit for what they’re learning. Some of the more typical summer credits are physical education and occupational education (which simply will mean that they perform some work). When you add up those credits, just count or estimate hours, with an eye towards 120-180 hours representing one credit, and 75-90 hours representing a half a credit. Perhaps your child plays in an orchestra or sings in a choir during the summer, and they meet for 2 hours a day. You can estimate those hours and say, “it looks like they’re going to spend ten hours a week, over eight weeks of summer, to total eighty hours, which will be a half a credit experience. ”

Creating educational titles for your student’s summer classes is an essential task. For example, my son’s swim classes weren’t called ‘summer swim league’. I recorded them as ‘P. E. Swimming’. Likewise, ‘occupational education’ is a better title than ‘yard work’. If you get stuck on educational titles, look at a community college and see which class titles are there. Quite often, community colleges offer courses that are a little outside the box, which can help spur you on to think about educational class titles.

Totaltranscriptsolution.com assists homeschooling parents in converting the years of independent training into high school transcripts. The site also offers a few general info on homeschool transcripts template.