Summer Schedule

Bip and I have the bed all to ourselves for the week since Philip is gone. He’s spending the week in Hawaii (lucky guy) at a conference he put together. I’m not too sure what exactly his job is, so I can’t explain this conference. I know he’s in charge of a global satellite system and trying to get as many joint commands to use it as possible. Joint commands are where multiple branches of the US Armed Services are serving together in one unit. I think. Could be wrong, wouldn’t be the first time.

With Philip being gone and summer having arrived with a bang, I decided to mix things up a bit with our schedule. We school year round for two reasons. First off, we take a break from our regularly scheduled curriculum on Fridays. We don’t skip the assignments or double up on another day, we just push the 5th days’ work into the next week and everything moves over one day. If you do the math, you’ll see that we end up with 9 weeks beyond the more traditional 36 week school calendar. Those weeks, plus 7 weeks worth of breaks scheduled around the year make up our year round school. Taking one day a week off gives us a lot of flexibility. Sometimes that day is for appointments or other non-school related activities. Most of the time, though, it is for our extra fun things, like music, art and hand crafts.

The other reason we school throughout the summer is to prevent the summer boredom and craziness. My oldest tends to run amok without specific, directed things to do. Left to his own devices, he irritates me and his sister and ends up in trouble. Having schoolwork to do leaves less hours of the day for him to be naughty. Not to say I schedule every minute of his day. That would drive all of us nuts. But between school, chores, quiet time, and meals, his free time is in shorter blocks of time throughout the day- just long enough for uber-silliness to start to creep in but short enough for me to end it before the trouble starts.

The only problem is, we usually have school in the morning and by afternoon it’s blazing hot and humid outside. Today’s forecast – hot, in the 90’s, humid, chance of thunderstorm in the afternoon. That’ll be the forecast until September. The children last all of 5 minutes outside before coming in, first for water, then for a hat, then just give up altogether. You’d never even know that public schools were out for the summer. It’s so hot that there are no children out at all.

So we readjusted our schedule. We loaded up Bip in the stroller and headed to the park at 9 am. It was still warm in the sun, but there was a good breeze. We stayed out for an hour, then came home. By the time I put Bip down for a nap, we were able to start school at 10:30. Everything else in our normal schedule has been moved down. I wasn’t entirely happy with the fact that by being at the park, our morning chores didn’t get finished until 1 pm. Maybe tomorrow we’ll do chores before going to the park.

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