Summer time is a time for kids to relax and unwind from the stress of the school year.It's okay for kids to goof off, snack between meals, stay up late, and even watch more television than they would normally watch.
But if, as a parent, you don't believe that memorizing all the dialogue and gestures in every episode of Sponge Bob Square Pants will give your children an educational leg-up next year, you may not be alone.
Whether your children go to boarding school, private school, public school, online school or are such radical unschoolers that you don't know where they are most of the time, they are all homeschooled in the summer, and that means we are all homeschooling parents. We have a wonderful opportunity to teach them new things, help them get ahead for the next school year, help them to explore new interests, or remediate learning from the previous school year.
You don't have to send them to summer school!
But no matter what you do, you don't want your children to feel chained to a desk, especially in the summer. You need to make it interesting.
One company, Time4Learning offers web-based summer learning that is comprehensive and fun.
"Time4Learning is a great change from school and for some children, a great antidote (and an interesting alternative to attendance at summer school). What this means is that many children have developed some bad habits about school. They've found themselves in a rut where their learning style and the school's teaching style are not working. This is especially likely with the children that find themselves needing remediation since they have apparently been thru the school year without learning what they are supposed to. Time4Learning allows the student to control the pace and learn the material which can be a very maturing opportunity for them. The summer school environment in many ways would just recreate the classroom environment with all the same distractions, teaching styles, and attitude problems that created the problem in the first place."
Not a bad idea.
