5 Tips for Finishing Your School Year (When You Want to Be Done!)

Hi, this is Sheri from the blog OurLifeHomeschooling.com, where I post homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms. I'm going to be talking in this video about some tips for helping you finish the end of your homeschool year when you're ready to be done. So when spring hits for us, I get very anxious about summer and ready to just do something different. If you've been homeschooling for any period of time, it's harder to make a distinction between schoolwork and life learning. They kind of mesh together, and although our academic work technically stops at the end of the school year, we are doing so many other things that I consider just as valuable, and just as much learning is happening during these times as is happening during the academic year. We do 180 school days. We do a regular school year just like kids that go to school. We don't do school year-round. It's just what works best for our family. So we are finishing up here in a few weeks, and at our home we live on a small farmette, and in the spring we get animals. We get chicks. We have laying hens throughout the year. We raise piglets. So there's a lot happening outside. We garden. We have a strawberry bed and then our regular vegetable bed, and it seems like it gets bigger every year. The more that we are feeding and the more our kids are helping, and some of them want to have their own gardens and expand. So there's just a lot going on. We're all drawn outside in the spring months, and I don't know about you, but I'm ready to just have a change of pace in our learning. When we're doing school during springtime, I still give my kids their regular checklist and expect them to do the checklist that they have done throughout the year. They get that out after our morning time, and they get started and start working on that. So that includes, of course, the basics like reading, writing, and math. However, we are just a lot looser with it. That's kind of the general expectation, but a lot of times they will want to do school outside. They'll want to do, hey, can I try this instead of writing? Can I write this person that's a pen pal, or can I do this project instead of this? And I just become a lot more flexible because when they get excited about something and they want to do something, that is when they're really learning. So in spring, we continue with our checklist, and there's this expectation that we are going to do it every day. But in reality, we hold it really loosely, and I just am very flexible with allowing them to do some other things as long as they're keeping up with their reading, writing, and math. Realistically, we do the majority of our book work from January to March. There's no major holidays going on. It's cold. There's a lot of wintry weather. We're all kind of stuck inside anyway, and truthfully, we get probably twice as much academic work done during those three months as we do at other times. We get a lot done. We make a lot of progress. I love that flexibility in homeschooling, and it's one of the big reasons that we do homeschool. Here are some tips for finishing your homeschool year when you're ready to be done. The first tip is to mix it up. Sometimes just a little spontaneity in your day and changing things up, doing something completely out of the ordinary can just be something that kind of just gives you new energy and helps the kids to get excited about learning. So maybe start your day with a walk outside, a nature walk, or exercise together with your kids. Let them all go outside. Maybe you want to start with just planning a really exciting breakfast together. Plan something completely different and something that they love. Just do something completely out of the ordinary. Whatever you normally do, mix it up. Do the opposite. One year, my kids were interested in Monopoly, and they found a Monopoly documentary on the Internet, and they wanted to watch it. So we did that one morning, totally changed it up. And after that, they asked if they could play Monopoly all day. Now, in this documentary, they learned the history of the game. They learned about full classes in schools that are based around the game Monopoly. They learned strategy, some strategies that I was completely unfamiliar with. So when they asked if they could play Monopoly all day, I did hesitate. But in the end, I said yes, and they played several games of Monopoly all day, and they really learned so much. When they were telling me some of the strategies they learned from this documentary and from playing together, I was really genuinely surprised. They still talk about this day when we played Monopoly all day as one of the highlights or one of the best days of our homeschool. So try mixing it up. Do something completely different, and it might just spark some excitement and get them thinking in a new way. A second tip I would give is to go outside. Everybody wants to be outside, and the flexibility that we have in homeschooling is one of the reasons that we do it, so why not take advantage of it? Let them take their writing or their math out to the table on the deck or on your patio. When you're reading to them, why don't you spread a blanket on the grass and read to them outside? Yes, it can be a little bit more distracting for some kids that have trouble focusing, but my thinking is in spring and at the end of the school year, they're often distracted anyway, even inside, and so I really feel like it doesn't make all that much of a difference. A third suggestion is to try something totally new. I would not suggest trying out a brand new curriculum like a new history curriculum or math curriculum at this time in the year. I think that would be very stressful, but you could try something. Maybe there's a unit study that you've always wanted to do. I am not a unit study type person. It's just not what works for me or what works for my kids, but I had bought a unit study from homeschool in the woods one year that was a lap book that you can make for your state, and inside it has the state flower, the state song, the state motto, and it's just a little project that they can make and learn all about your state, and this is something that I thought would really be great for our kids. It would help us get in Pennsylvania history, and it's something I bought and I thought looked really fun, but realistically was never able to fit into our day, and although I always wanted to do it, it just never happened. So last year at the end of the year in spring, I decided to finally give this a go and to try this little unit study on the state of Pennsylvania making this lap book, and it took us maybe we did like an hour every morning, and we worked on it, and we really enjoyed it. It kind of just helped us get to the end of our school year, and the kids liked just doing something different, studying something completely out of the ordinary. We don't usually make lap books, so that was something new for them, and we have a lot of great memories of doing that unit together. So if there's something like that, that's something you've always wanted to try or to study together with them that's completely out of the ordinary for what you usually do, I think it's a great idea to just try something new. My fourth tip is to take advantage of field trip opportunities. A lot of things are opening up again with the warmer weather, and there's so much to do out there. Go to a natural place or go on a hike or visit a museum. Kids love going out, and it really makes their learning come to life and gets them exposed. It exposes them to a lot of different things and different ideas. One of our favorite field trips was going to an Amazon fulfillment center. We get Amazon boxes frequently to our doorstep, and the kids really have no idea about what happens behind the scenes, and we went with our co-op and visited an Amazon fulfillment center, and everybody really loved it. We were surprised by how big it was and how they organized things with their computers. So doing a field trip in spring is a great way to just distract us all, get us thinking about something else, and getting us out there and exposed to some different ideas. The last tip I would give is to include life skills in your homeschool. As I've said several times, I do think continuing with reading, writing, and math is really important, and we try to make sure those things are happening. But life skills are something that is so needed for kids to learn. Just simple things like washing the dishes, cleaning up after yourself, organizing a cabinet, learning to wash the car, learning to sew on a button, learning to wash your own clothes. I've done two posts on life skills, one on life skills in spring and life skills to teach in winter. You can go on to Our Life Homeschooling and see more about those. I can also link those below. If you feel like I do sometimes, that the housework and the homeschool is constantly competing, this might be a great time to just use some more life skills to help you get ahead of some of the projects you feel behind on, and also for them to learn some new things. Cooking is a great skill for them to learn. Let them plan some meals, help you grocery shop. Spring is a great time to be a little bit more flexible, I think, with some of those things because we can be out. There are more yard projects and more yard work. If you live somewhere where you have animals like we do, we have a lot of care that needs to happen outside, and getting our garden ready is a lot of work. Take advantage of those things. This is why we homeschool, so we can be flexible and teach some of these things that are not necessarily bookwork but are equally important and will help them throughout their life. I hope you found this helpful. If you like the encouragement and the ideas that you get from my YouTube channel, would you please like and subscribe? You can also find more ideas and more information at my blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com. I would love if you would subscribe. I send out a weekly newsletter with all the latest from the blog and from my YouTube channel. Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day.