Taking a Homeschool Break Just Before the End of the Year

As summer approaches, many homeschool families are scrambling to wrap up their school work and begin summer break.  I, on the other hand, have decided to step back for a couple weeks and take a break before we finish our work.  We are very close to wrapping up our textbook work, so you might be wondering why I would choose to take a break now instead of in a few weeks.  The answer is simple: my daughter and I were not enjoying ourselves.

My personal blog is titled, Joy Focused Learning.  I created it with the goal of inspiring other homeschool families to focus on the joy of learning.  My own goal for homeschooling is that my daughter will develop a love of learning.  If you follow my blog, you may have noticed that things have been pretty quiet.  I haven’t had anything particularly inspiring to share.  I didn’t want to fake it, so I just haven’t written much about our homeschool work lately.  Somehow along the way we got caught up in assignments and to-do lists, and we stopped having fun.  C isn’t an early riser, so we don’t typically start school until 10:00 or 11:00.  With such a late start, I began cutting back on the fun extras so we could get everything done at a decent hour.  I worried that if school went too late, I wouldn’t get anything checked off my to-do list.

Of course, without much enrichment, C started to complain about school days.  I was getting pretty grumpy about them, too, because of the guilt I felt about neglecting the fun of learning.  We needed a break.  I thought about pushing through and starting fresh next year, but I didn’t like the direction we were headed.  C needed some time to just play and have fun, and I needed more time having fun with her.  I also wanted to take a look at our work load and come up with a new schedule that works for us. So far, we are still just enjoying the break.  I plan to tackle our schedule soon.

I would love to hear how you fit fun learning into your homeschool day!  Leave me a comment below.