Summer slide

You’ve heard, no doubt, about summer “learning loss.” Summer slide is the reason every school year begins with review of skills mastered the year before. As a teacher, I don’t fret about so-called learning loss because if a student has truly mastered academic skills, he or she will recall them when book learning begins. For homeschoolers and others, summer presents the perfect opportunity to introduce academic subjects in a fun way. It’s a time for field trips, outdoor exploration and special projects. If your family has the money, you could invest in enrichment classes, but if you’re looking to cut back on spending, as I am, focus on freebies:

1) Check out programs at your local library. Public libraries often offer free reading programs, as well as other activities, in the summer.

2) Investigate volunteer opportunities. Community and cultural organizations often seek free help, and this provides an opportunity for your teen or pre-teen to do some service learning. Examples: a local hospital seeks teens to deliver mail and flowers to patients; an outdoor museum seeks “junior naturalists” to assist with children’s programs; a community theatre seeks help with ushering, putting up posters and creating sets; a local child-care center seeks volunteers to read and play with children.

3) Consider entering projects in your county fair. If you live in a rural area, check out the myriad opportunities to exhibit items at the county fair. Your state university extension service can provide more information. There’s no charge to enter items at our county fair, and for exhibiting, we gain free admission: a $30 savings. The county fair offers children the opportunity to exhibit in a variety of areas (and maybe even to win a ribbon!): from arts and crafts to science projects. We’ve seen some amazing work by youngsters over the years in the areas of quilting, floral arranging, baking, woodworking and more.

4) Focus on health. Summer is a great time to cover subjects in the health curriculum: skin cancer prevention, thunderstorm safety, water safety, bicycle safety, good nutrition, benefits of exercise and more.

5) Attend free concerts. Many communities offer free outdoor concerts in the summer. Check your local newspaper for listings. Allegra and I recently attended a free indoor piano concert and lecture on ragtime, blues and jazz. It was educational and fun.

6) Looking to get rid of unwanted possessions? Stage a yard sale and enlist your children to help. They will learn how to price items, keep an inventory, display merchandise, interact with the public and handle money. For a simple math lesson, teach them how to add up the cost of merchandise and to make change. Promise them a percentage of the profits and let them figure out how much that will be.

7) Get together with other homeschoolers or neighbors to stage a Great American Bake Sale to end hunger in America. Visit http://www.strength.org/. Baking is kitchen chemistry. It also teaches math (proportion and measurement). As with a yard sale, children will learn to interact with the public and to use everyday math skills. But they will also learn to help others in need.

8) Play board games that reinforce academic skills: card games that require math such as cribbage, word games such as Scrabble and history/geography games such as Great States. The whole family can join in the fun of learning.

End-of-year evaluation

At the end of the academic year, the local school district requires homeschoolers to present evidence of what they’ve accomplished during the academic year. Otherwise, there is no oversight: At no other time during the school year does the district request progress reports. For our end-of-year evaluation, we submitted a box containing folders of important work (essays, lab reports, tests, researched papers) from every class, as well as a large art portfolio containing special projects. Allegra took digital pictures of 3-D projects too cumbersome to transport, such as her small-scale models of a Roman aqueduct and a Greek temple. We also provided a separate folder with standardized test results. When I called the school district to ask about procedure for end-of-the-year evaluation, the secretary for the director of teaching and learning instructed us to “drop off” work samples at the office at our convenience. Once we arrived, she called out the director to meet with us. At a glance, the director of teaching and learning determined Allegra had met the district’s educational requirements. But, to her credit, she spent about 30 minutes talking with Allegra about her homeschooling experience. I sensed we submitted too much material when she advised us to bring only “showcase pieces” to next year’s evaluation. I left the evaluation feeling it would be too easy for homeschoolers to neglect their education.

Allegra's take: After my talk with the director of teaching and learning, I, too, felt that I could have presented her with nothing but a poster, an essay, and a test and she would have believed that I had been properly educated. Homeschoolers (or, in this case, half-schoolers or unschoolers) could easily do nothing throughout the year but create those “showcase pieces” and still be approved.

However, those homeschoolers who have been genuinely teaching and learning have to deal with the predjudices of those who have witnessed the Unschooled. Often, officials make assumptions; for example, our director of teaching and learning informed us that we should put emphasis on math and science and blend English/Language Arts with those subjects, when, in fact, we were already doing just that. One look through my math and science folders would have proved this.

The key for evaluations is to strike the right balance. If you specifically present several showcase pieces but also have a few folders on hand to show that you did actually work, your evaluation will be a complete success.