Summer Homeschool Recap 2023

I’m happy to report a successful summer homeschooling season 2023.

The children all finished up their math lessons with Teaching Textbooks, and they will all level up in a couple of weeks.

I decided to put a hold on Question a Day Journal for Kids and start it up again in September. I also decided to hold all spelling workbooks and just continue where we left off this next year.

S and K finished The Good and the Beautiful cursive level 4 and B will continue with it this next year. Everyone worked more with Typing Agent. My oldest completed The Good and the Beautiful language arts level 6 and The Mystery of History level 1.

My two youngest completed their Extreme Book Nerd challenges and my oldest is So close to finishing up (a separate post about those challenges coming soon…).

My daughter had a fun time dancing in a ballet recital. All 3 children started to learn about horsemanship and western style riding. They completed 2 weeks of swimming lessons at the public pool. We had fun practicing rowing and steering an inflatable raft on nearby reservoirs.

We saw a children’s version of a Shakespeare play (shortened to 1 hour and an actor gave us a brief explanation between scenes) and tried out Shibori (a Japanese technique) tie dying with indigo at nearby libraries.

We visited a few local museums and a few State Parks. We read some good books (a separate post about those is coming soon…) and enjoyed some yummy ice cream treats.

A summer highlight for me was visiting an old nearby theatre and seeing two documentary films. I used to love going to the movies. It’s been difficult to find wholesome films lately. Even when we find a good film, there are the previews which can be super creepy/scary/gross even when the feature film is rated G. These events were such fun treats for us!

The children were So excited for the opportunity to try out gold panning this summer. With some assistance from the professionals, we all found a least one teeny tiny fleck of gold.

We kept our mini flock of chickens safe from coyotes (we saw coyotes on 3 separate occasions trying to see if they could grab a quick snack). We also thoroughly enjoyed watching cottontail bunnies, chipmunks, jackrabbits, several families of quail, lots of lizards, and a couple non-venomous snakes in our yard.

For my self-imposed mama/teacher summer continuing education I read 2 books:

1. The Wild and Free Family: Forging Your Own Path to a Life Full of Wonder, Adventure, and Connection – I enjoyed the book but not as much as I enjoyed her first book The Call of the Wild and Free: Reclaiming the Wonder in Your Child’s Education, A New Way to Homeschool – if you only read one homeschool book, I’d recommend that one.

2. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (technically I haven’t quite finished this one yet) – my fave nugget from this book (so far) was to move “outside time in nature” from the “leisure time column” into the “health and wellness column”. This was a new concept for me and I’m re-prioritizing “green time” for our homeschool. IMO, this is probably an important book for parents to read.

We have just a couple weeks of summer left and a few more activities planned. We’ll start the new school year with a “not back to school picnic” the Tuesday after Labor Day!

We hope you had a great summer and that you have some fun fall plans to look forward to!

Cheers to summer 2023 and wishes for a homeschooling year 2023-2024 full of wonder!

💖 heavenstobetty