6 Excellent Reasons to Take a Summer Break
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Do you feel guilty taking a summer break when so many homeschooling families are praising the advantages of year-round schooling? Don’t!
My family loves our summer break, and we can’t imagine life without it. Maybe our list of reasons to take a summer break will give you the permission you need to savor the lazy days of summer.
Reasons to Take a Summer Break
1. It provides a change of pace.
Summer break allows my kids and me to change our pace. We look forward to a couple of months of lazy, empty, guilt-free days of doing whatever we want.
We can spend all day at the pool, curl up with a book and read, disappear on a long hike, or spend all day baking cookies together. The days are ours to enjoy.
2. Summer break allows time to complete projects.
Summer break gives us time to tackle the more time-consuming projects that are hard to complete during the school year. The kids want to throw themselves into writing a book, learning to sew, or programming a game. But there are math lessons to complete, writing assignments to do, and activities to attend.
There’s nothing like a long summer break to give the kids and me ample time to dig into these long-term projects.
Summer break allows me to take off the teacher hat and savor simply being Mom for a time.3. It allows plenty of time to plan the next homeschool year.
I use the summer to plan next year’s homeschool. First, I print out all the worksheets, maps, and printables, order science supplies, and restock the art supplies. Then, I figure out where we need to be at the end of each quarter and how to get half-way through the school year by Christmas.
The more I plan during the summer, the more chaos-resistant my homeschool becomes. We can homeschool even if we ran around all weekend with friends and I had no time at all to plan. Homeschool planning during the summer is a life-saver!
4. Summer break means guilt-free time for spending all day outside.
I live in the Pacific Northwest. It’s wet and cloudy much of the year. People new to the area always ask if we still hold park days when it rains. Of course, we do! Otherwise, we’d never meet.
But the summer is beautiful around here. The grass is green. The temperature hangs around 75 degrees. The weather is perfect for spending outside. The kids and I don’t want to be filling out math sheets when the sun is shining. We want to be outside, exploring the area and soaking up the rays.
5. It provides time just to be a parent instead of a homeschooling parent.
I love being able to stop homeschooling for an extended time. No more nagging kids about math. No more fighting over writing assignments. Instead, I take off the teacher hat and savor simply being Mom for a time.
Putting aside the school assignments frees up time that I can use to teach the children new skills such as sewing, knitting, and gardening.
6. Everyone is excited about the new school year.
Do you remember the excitement of shopping for school supplies and looking forward to what the new school year might bring? While we love our lazy days of summer, after a few weeks boredom can set in.
At that point, the kids are excited to look at their new books. They’re looking forward to filling in their planners. And they’re enthusiastic to start school again and get back to our regular homeschool routine.
Summer break gives us both much-needed break and the pleasure of looking forward with eager anticipation to the new school year.
Do you take a summer break? What are your favorite reasons for doing so?
If your summer planning includes brainstorming activity ideas for your homeschool group, check out the free download, 52 Weeks of Homeschool Group Activities.
As a year round homeschooler and someone who has done it both ways. the only comment I would make is that we take off more time total than those who take a couple months in the summer. I feel less burnt out because every six weeks we take a week off and then those 3-4 weeks in june and july that don’t quite make term we go to camp or vbs. I do have time to plan and I don’t feel stressed to plan a whole semester at once. Just six weeks at a time. BUT I would add, you should never compare your homeschool to someone else’s. You do what works for your kids and your family and whether it follows the public system or is year round never feel guilty about doing what is right for you.
Absolutely! You’ve got to do what is best for your family, without guilt. We were year-round schoolers for several years. The last 2 or 3 years, my teens and I both felt we needed and wanted a long summer break, so that’s what we did. Both had their advantages and disadvantages.
When we lived in the Pac-NW, we were just as enthusiastic about summer and taking the time off while the weather was begging for us to be outside. Now? We live in SE Texas, no one wants to be outside during the summer. So we’re avid year-rounders now. We take lots of random days off during the spring and late fall, when the temperatures beckon us outside. So it all boils down to the same point really: do school when you’re stuck inside because the weather outside is frightful.