Summer School at Home

Hello Moms-
Hope that you are enjoying the last few weeks of summer before school starts again.  I wanted to write about a tip that you can still implement in the next couple of weeks before school starts.  I'm calling it "Summer School at Home". 

If you have a child like mine who is constantly bored, this will give you a great activity for him or her to do in those "boring times".  This will also help with minimizing the electronics time (watching tv, playing video games, etc). 

What we've done this summer is given our son, Emmanuel, several assignments.  He has to do book reports and writing assignments based on things he reads in the encyclopedia.  Now, I'm sure not everyone has an encyclopedia set anymore but thank goodness for Google and the library.  You can find whatever you're looking for using those two resources.

Emmanuel has done various reports on topics such as the peregrine falcon, the brain, and electricity.  He picks the topic so it's something that he's interested in.  He looks it up in the encyclopedia and then writes 8-10 statements based on what he read.  Currently, he's writing a make-believe story on bionics.  But in order to be able to write the story, he had to look up what bionics is, where it originated from, and he'll have to use several of his notes within the story.

"So how do we get a kid to do this in the summer," you may be thinking.  Quite easily, believe it or not.  It's all based on a rewards chart.  When he completes his tasks for the day, including his "homework", he gets "points" and by the end of the week, depending on how many points he has obtained, he gets rewards.  Rewards can be something like dessert one night after dinner, 2 hours of "chillax" time which means he gets to do what he wants without us (his parents) telling him what to do, and if he gets a lot of points for the week, he can do something fun like putt-putting.  He picks his rewards so he knows what he's aiming for that week and based on his decisions that he makes, he either gets the rewards or doesn't. 

In addition to the writing assignments, he works on a summer bridge workbook every day.  Again, points are assigned for what he completes every day.  By the way, if he complains while doing any of it, there are no points for that day.  The workbook includes topics such as reading, writing, and math.

I know it may sound like a lot but typically doing any of this work may take up to an hour of the day. Doing this "homework" allows for him to stay in school while he's not in school, brushing up on the areas that he needs most help in and every time I hear "I'm bored", my response is "ok, great.  Have you done your homework today?"

If you're a couple of weeks away (or even a week away) from starting school, it's not too late to start implementing ways to get the kids back into the swing of things with some summer school at home.

Have a great week! God bless!