Here is the plan I came up with for summer learning...
Each morning at breakfast we do what we call "Scripture Power" which just means we read one story from the Book of Mormon stories, and one from the current year's church study (this year being The Doctrine and Covenants). After we finish that, we do the calendar, weather/season, and then the kids tell us their names, Mom and Dad's names, our address, and our phone number.* Then after we clean up breakfast, we do one worksheet from their folders. I compiled the worksheets from workbooks that we had and from what I found online, and divided them age appropriately (Olive has uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers 1-20; Lucy has uppercase letters and numbers 1-10; George has shapes and colors and the letter G).
*Lucy knew our phone number after only hearing it once or twice - bright girl! And Olive says, "303 Ohwyming Street" for our address - love that!
I set goals for each of the kids to achieve by the end of summer; they are:
- Olive -- write her first and last name, be able to write all letters both uppercase and lowercase, be able to write numbers 1-20, be able to count to 100, and begin learning sight words
- Lucy -- write her first name, be able to write all uppercase letters, be able to write numbers 1-10, be able to count to 20
- George -- recognize the letter G, know colors (he already does this, so we'll just continue to review), know shapes
The rest of the morning is unstructured play or an outing, and learning as we go. I'm finding more and more that there are a million teaching opportunities just naturally happening throughout the day (counting pushes on the swing, looking for letters on street signs, finding the beat in a song, watching a bug and then going online to find out more about it), so I try to take advantage of those as much as possible. After lunch and naps/quiet time, we do more unstructured play and centers. The kids take turns at centers, like blocks, puzzles, Spanish, finger painting, and using the computer, for a few examples. Then when Chris gets home I ask the kids to tell him about something we did or learned or read, so they can have practice explaining things in their own words.
It all sounds kinda lofty, but it actually happens pretty naturally so it's easy. And even though we've only been doing it for a week or so, I can see they're already learning a bunch. And I'm having a blast with it!
