School's Out!!! (Well, Kind Of)

Sweetheart officially completed 3rd grade yesterday!!! Yeah!!!

Here's the strange thing about homeschooling---you decide when they are done. Some moms set a date and wherever they are in the curriculum by that date, that's it. You know, in public school we never once finished a text book so it's kind of like that.

Other parents live in states where they have to count the days so when they reach their allotted number---done! I decided we would be done when we finished math and history. We finished math last week and history yesterday. Yesterday was also the last day for a lot of kids around here so it worked out well.

Since we sort of just fizzed out, finishing one subject at at time, there is no dramatic feeling of "wow! we're done!!!!" So I decided to have a special dinner to celebrate the end of 3rd. I found this free certificate and printed it on nice paper. We are having Sweetheart's favorite meal. I'll also give her the certificate that comes in the back of her Math U See book. And THEN, she will officially be a 4th grader.

Sniff. My baby will be 10 soon!

We are planning to have a great, fun summer. I am going to start using my workboxes in a modified way as I try to figure out how I'm going to use them next year. We will have a theme each week, just like last year.

This year we have chosen:

watermelons--to kick off the summer

First Aid--we wanted to do some biographies and Clara Barton and the Red Cross came to mind. Probably because I did book report on her several different years when I was in school. Why read a new book if you have a new teacher, you know? Plus it's a good thing to study First Aid at the beginning of the summer.

butterflies--there are so many art projects to go with this, we couldn't resist! We will be attending a butterfly display at the museum too.

dolls--this one evolved from a lot of ideas and we mushed 'em all together. The girls love their dolls, there are dolls in every country of the world and throughout history little girls have played with dolls....this is coming up around the week of Independence day.....we have American Girl dolls....why not dress the dolls up in 4th of July costumes and celebrate with them? Whew!

dogs--My niece Gnat loves dogs right now but sister and I didn't really want to focus on "dogs as pets" as Sweetheart wants one really badly but is not getting one anytime soon and neither are her girls for that matter, so we decided to focus on working dogs and famous dogs.

artists--art as a career, famous artists...plus we will try out every kind of art we can think of. Sculpting, painting, etc.

imaginary creatures--My other niece Moose is still on her mermaid kick and the older girls wanted to study horses--again. We said no more! So we decided to study unicorns (our horse alternative), mermaids, fairies, etc. We will be focusing on the imaginary part as some of these things are presented to children as being real.

So every day a theme activity will go into one of the workboxes. In the other boxes will be math practice, handwriting, astronomy (not quite through with that one yet), and fun stuff.

So, what are you doing for "summer school"?