Thursday, April 10, 2014

Spring just started...

...yet, I'm already thinking about summer. Crazy when that happens, no?

We usually school year round, working through a lot of the summer. Why? Have you ever hung out outside in Georgia in July? Yeah. Not pretty. Sweaty, muggy, sweaty, hot, sweaty. Blech. We'd much rather just relax inside, with our A/C. The upside of that, is we take more breaks throughout the year. Spring beach trips. Our annual pilgrimage to Dragon Con over Labor Day. Extra time off during the holidays. We even managed to sneak in an extra vacation this past fall.

Even though we I say we school all year long, we usually end up wrapping up our year in July, giving us the month of August off. Not always, but more years than not, they had that month long break. It works out well, since we don't start our next school year until after we get back from D*C.

Why am I thinking about summer now though? Because the eldest is in high school now, and I'm really working hard on building a portfolio/transcripts for him. And also, summer plans = fun stuffs!

We have more plans for this summer than we have had in the past. I want to take my computer geek kids to a live sporting event. :) They love soccer, but haven't really been exposed to other sports. Especially not live sports. We have a minor league baseball team/stadium about 45 minutes from our house, and I think that would be an awesome field trip.

For the first time since we started homeschooling, we are a part of an active homeschool group that we LOVE! There's park day. Hike day. Archery day. Help at the Animal Shelter day. Lots going on and lots to be a part of. We also purchased season passes to Six Flags and White Water.

I'm kinda tired already. :/

With all of these plans, you might be wondering how we will fit in any school at all.

Well, fret not my pretties. We have gadgets. Tablets, apps and WiFi, oh my! ;) They have long been appreciating being able to do their spelling and vocabulary on their tablets with the VocabularySpellingCity app, but just this week, they were able to ... wait for it... waaaaait...

DO THEIR TIME4LEARNING ON THEIR TABLETS!

There was an app released, Puffin Academy, that allows for programs like T4L to run. It's totally free, and every lesson/video/quiz they've encountered so far has ran smoothly on their tablets (They both have the Galaxy Note 10.1). I got a text this morning from one of them, informing me that they did ALL of their T4L from the comfort of the couch, and they loved using the touch interface of the tablets over using a mouse on their PC.

Fabulously snazzy!

So, yeah. Thinking ahead to summer already. Man. This wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff needs to just slow the heck down for a little while, dontcha think?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Summer was made for fun and I know your house is a fun house!

We are taking a break this summer as well. We normally school year round, but we simply have too much on our plate right now.

Joyfully,
Jackie
Let's Homeschool High School Admin Team

Unknown said...

We do try to have as much fun as we can! ;)

Thanks for stopping by, Jackie!