Things We Want to Do This Summer

Here are our summer plans.

Liam wants to write a story, work on his classical guitar playing, program a game and work for his dad. Brendan wants to work on his new book, learn more about politics and build a facsimile ship. Clare wants to finish her book, go on exercise expeditions with Kieron, do some nature study, and visit friends in Northern California. Sean wants to play football. Kieron wants to work on his nature journal, exercise with Clare, get a pet, and finish off the baseball season. I think he wants to play football this year too. Aidan seems to want to spend most or all of his time outside and go to lots of different places. His T ball season just ended yesterday. Paddy seems to want to play on the computer mostly, right now. They all seem to go through that stage when they are about 3.5.

As a family we plan to: visit the lake regularly and see relatives, go through birthdays (3 of those this June), read, play video games, do the normal scheduled things like therapy and music (choir and violin), visit the library and play or work outside near our log home in the Sierras. We want to go to the craft fair and the homeschool campout, and there is the weekly homeschool Stations of the Cross. There’s probably much more that I’ve forgotten. Liam and Clare want to try out some new recipes. Clare wants to read through the Jack Aubrey series and probably Brendan will do that too.

Kevin (dad) wants to spend more time relaxing than he has in the past couple of years, weight train and run with the teen boys, work on the house maintenance or repair projects, read his Roman history and make progress on his next game now that the old one is essentially finalled.
I want to: go on family hikes, work on Latin and Greek while Liam is here, be involved with the kids’ interests, write a story, have discussions. I want to plant a garden too and do some work on the yard, hopefully with help. I know it’s almost June but our last snow just melted last week! As always, there is too much to do to fit in a summer! Maybe it would help to just imagine summer all year around?? Of course, in August Liam will have to go back to college and I will probably have another attack of curriculum-craving. Right now, though I miss the lesson-planning, there seems more than enough to do without it.

Aidan, almost 7, appears to be an emergent reader. In the past week or so he has spent several hours on phonics by way of his V Tech game, his leapfrog phonics game, and checking out the letters everywhere in the environment — license plates, spare tire covers, sides of trucks — I see a pattern there — things with wheels are big motivators for him. By following his interests, I have supported him in spending more time on this than I ever would have scheduled him for at his age and developmental stage.

I intend to look back at this in August and see what we actually got to! Usually it’s about 70% of what we had planned.