Create the perfect summer homeschool schedule for your family. Decide on your priorities, spend quality time together, and make memories!
When it comes to summer, it can be hard to figure out what you want your homeschool schedule to look like. Homeschooling gives us so many options and a lot of flexibility, but that can sometimes make it harder to pinpoint exactly what we want. Not to mention all of the information bombarding us from other homeschool families and how they do things.
The first thing to note is that what works for other families might not work for yours, and vice versa. Your kids are yours for a specific reason. They were given to you because you have something specific that they need!
Summer Homeschool Schedule Ideas
The diversity in the homeschool community is incredible! And that’s the beauty of homeschooling. The ability for homeschool families to do their own unique thing and to have the freedom to change things up whenever they want.
With that being said, you do not actually have to take a summer break. If you still have workbooks you would like your children to complete, or you are worried that a long break might make your children forget everything, then don’t take a whole break. Many homeschool families do school year-round. They do not take a break specifically in the summer and work breaks in all throughout the year. An example I see a lot is doing school for 6 weeks, and then taking 1 week off. You can make a schedule that works best for your families’ needs.
For our family, we continue until the workbooks are finished. We typically start in August and hope to have everything done by the end of May to mid-June. Then we do take a summer break from math and language arts until starting again in August. I love taking a break from lessons and having more time throughout the day to spend reading aloud together.
Summer is also a great time to cover a subject that you really want to but struggle to find time to do it during regular school days. Things like geography, unit studies, science, history, music study, watercolor, hymns, poetry, etc. We do a lot of science through the summer because you can easily study insects, plants, amphibians, and do any messy experiments outside.
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Summer Homeschool Outside Schedule
The majority of our summer is spent outside, and it involves lots of water play and chilling on a picnic blanket in the shade. It gets super hot and humid here in Tennessee, so while I do like the kids to run off energy, I also recognize how miserable it feels. As long as we are outside soaking up the vitamin D to boost our immune system, I’m happy.
On days that we are home, we head outside after breakfast and morning chores. We take our picnic blanket and set it out under the shade of a tree, and set up with lots of drawing materials, snacks, and our read aloud books.
Early summer when it isn’t too hot yet, we will even eat lunch outside. But once it’s past the comfortable phase, we take lunch inside and then have a quiet time so everyone can rest and cool down. Then it’s back outside with snacks and water play, and when everyone needs a rest again, we read some more.
Here are our favorite water play options:
- Pool if I have another adult to help me keep an eye on the kids.
- Splash pad tends to be a lot more often because I’m typically by myself. Check your area for free splash pads, but we also love to get a summer membership to our local rec center.
- Find a creek nearby and enjoy water in a nature setting.
- Sprinkler or slip ‘n slide at home.
- Water table filled with water or water beads.
- Inflatable water slide on the weekends when my husband is home to set it up.
Summer Homeschool Activity Schedule
Summer is the perfect time to slow down and just enjoy being together. No rushing around to get to activities, co-ops, field trips, etc. But summer is also the perfect time to plan a few activities that you wouldn’t usually have time for or are not normally available in every season.
Here are a few summer activity ideas for your homeschool schedule:
- Go fishing. Keep it fun but you can also make it educational by learning about their life cycle or learning how to clean a fish together.
- Plant a garden. It doesn’t have to be fancy and huge. Even just a small herb garden. Try to include some flowers around it so you can attract more pollinators and talk about why they are so important.
- Find local farms/orchards to pick strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and peaches in the early-mid summer, and apples in the late summer. Don’t hesitate to reach out to see if they do any sort of tours or learning opportunities you can include in your visit.
- Grab a kit to learn about and observe the life cycles of butterflies, lady bugs, ants or praying mantises.
- Make a bug trap and observe. Summer is the perfect time to study insects.
How to Make a Bug Trap:
- Grab a small shovel, small plastic container, a little bit of fruit, 5-6 small rocks and a small piece of cardboard.
- In a shaded area near a tree, dig a hole that your plastic container fits into snugly, with the top of the container level with the ground.
- Place your fruit in the plastic container.
- Put 4 rocks on the ground around the plastic container to set your cardboard on top. This will shade and cover the container while leaving room for bugs to crawl under it.
- Place another rock on top of the cardboard to hold it in place.
- Check your trap every few hours to see what you catch!
Summer Homeschool Reading Schedule
I love using our summer to do a lot of reading that we couldn’t normally do during our normal homeschool schedule. As I mentioned, we like to take a picnic blanket in the shade to stay cool. During this time, we read aloud a lot. We do continue to fit in some science and history over the summer because we currently only do read alouds for these subjects.
Reading aloud is a great way to include all ages in a subject, and it provides some great discussion. When you are reading aloud to a variety of ages, it’s important to have lots of activities and snacks to keep them busy so they can focus and listen. I also allow the younger two to get up and wander around, but they always end up coming back. They may not catch all of it, but they still soak up enough information.
Along with continuing science and history over the summer, I look forward to getting through a few larger read aloud books for our homeschool schedule. This past winter, we read through The Chronicles of Narnia series and my kids absolutely loved it! I didn’t want to dive into another long series, so we read a lot of shorter chapter books that cater a little more to my younger kids.
Currently, I’m probably getting a little ambitious as I plan out our read aloud books for the upcoming summer…I grabbed a beautifully illustrated copy of The Hobbit to jump into first!
The Perfect Summer Homeschool Schedule
Whether you plan to continue with all subjects through the summer, do a lighter load, or do no school work at all, the perfect summer homeschool schedule is one that caters to your priorities as a family!
What works for you this summer, may not work at all the next. But the beauty of homeschool is that it is flexible. You get to decide what stays and what goes, what is essential and what is not. Listen to your intuition, pray about it, and invite your kids into the conversation.
Now, I would love to know! Do you typically take your family vacation in the summer along with the public school families? Or do you do like we do and go either early or late to be around less crowds?? Let me know in the COMMENTS!
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Tiffany McCoy
Love this outlook on summer homeschooling!
Julie
Really great tips! My 4-year-old would love to do the bug trap so I will add it to our schedule!
akinforthesimplelife
It’s so simple and fun. My kids had a blast doing it last summer.
Renee Schiepers
Love these ideas, here in the Netherlands homeschooling is made almost impossible because of the tight legislation regarding the schooling of children. I would love to homeschool my children so I am searching for ways to make this happen. Fortunately, they are still small (2 years old and 9 months old) so we still have some time left to figure out how to homeschool here. These ideas sound great!
akinforthesimplelife
Hopefully by the time your children are school age, the regulations will have changed or you can find a loop hole!