Vacation School

A few months ago, when I was planning for our homeschool year, I sat down and planned out our schedule for the year. No, I am not one of those amazing homeschool moms who planned out every lesson for the year in July. Most days I prep what we’re going to do the night before we’re doing it, if I’m lucky (if not, I just fly by the seat of my pants, and that works just fine for kindergarten).

What I mean about planning our year is that I sat down and looked at all the weeks we would be doing school, the days/weeks we would be off, the days Miss would be at her other school, and then figured out how many hours per day I’d need to teach in order to meet our state’s requirement of 875 hours of instruction per year. I don’t actually have to do that many hours this year because formal homeschooling doesn’t have to start until next year. But this is my practice year, so I did it anyway.

This is one of the built-in “vacation” weeks for our year. We’re at the Farm for my husband’s annual week of deer hunting. I knew I wouldn’t be bringing our school work with us, so I didn’t count on logging any school hours this week.

But duh, it’s the Farm. Being here is like having a week-long field trip. I’m definitely logging some hours.

The girls got to see a groundhog in personal after the hired man captured one in the live trap (the groundhog was digging and making a mess in one of the buildings, so he was taken somewhere else). We had a nice impromptu review about groundhogs, while having the benefit of being able to point out, up close, their perpetually growing teeth and long claws for digging.

We’ve had plenty of outdoor exploration, discussing deer behaviors, inspecting scrapes, discovering where they might sleep and what they might eat.

We’ve had discussions about the formation of rocks, and there has been plenty of “gym class.” Balancing, jumping, running down and up hills, etc.

While playing on the hay bales, we found a big caterpillar. It was spiky and rolled into a ball each time we picked it up.

So, obviously, we had a discussion about animals’ natural defenses. And then we tried to guess what the caterpillar might eat, and we made a habitat for it.

I’ve laughed at myself a little bit this week, because we are not doing anything at all differently from what we would do here at the Farm if we weren’t homeschooling our kids. But since we are, I tend to think about everything differently:

“Oh, an animal skull. Science! They’re climbing. Gym class!”

Yes. I’m logging every bit of it. I love homeschooling.