Summer Fun--and Frustration!

I wish summer could be carefree and fun. But the girls' school assigns summer work. For most kids, it's probably no big deal. For mine, it means a summer of frustration. In fairness to the girls, I have Kaleb do the same summer Bridge Book Kayla does.

The bridge books are a good idea, but my kids don't just sit down and do them. We had hours and hours in the car driving to New Orleans and back, and to Indiana and back. FL to IN is 16 hours one way. If they were focused, they could have the whole book done. 

The skills in the book are supposed to be ones all fourth graders learned in the previous year, but that isn't always true. Some of the pages were super easy, others had math problems that I had to sit down and figure out how to do.

It's set up to do a two page section a day--if you have 100 days of summer. We don't. Plus Kaleb was at camp for a full week. 

Jasmine just finished her second week of band camp 10-4 & 6-9. She has to read Fahrenheit 451 and do some journal activities with it. She also has a math pack that she can't do because she wasn't in regular 8th grade math last year.

So it's a summer long struggle for us.

But we make time for other things. Scuba, snorkeling, swimming, running, movies, reading for fun, crafts, frozen yogurt etc.

We meet for family circle time every day. All of us wrote out a wish list/goal list for the summer. One of mine was to read 100 picture books to the kids this summer. You are never too old for picture books and never too old to be read to. So we read picture books, plus we just finished Journey to the Center of the Earth and are starting the Prince and the Pauper. We read the Wizard of Oz earlier in the summer. We talk about character traits, find verses about them and watch videos such as The Book of Virtues, do The Christian Girl's Guide to the Bible and talk about long term and short term goals in circle. It's a no fault, no penalty zone. Sometimes that takes a lot of determination on my part.  

The twins just finished their workbooks. We have two weeks until we go back to school. Next week is play week. The Missoula children's theater group travels to different places and does a play in a week with the local kids. On Monday morning the kids try out. For those who make it, rehearsals start immediately. They practice all week, and perform the play on Friday night.

So if the kids get parts, that will take up the whole week because the script has to be memorized in the evenings. We've tried out the last two years. (I didn't know about it before that). The first year Jasmine and Kayla were in it. The second year only Jasmine got a part. This year the play is The Little Mermaid, and I hope they all get a part. They always do their own version of a fairy tale. Last  year was Hansel and Gretel, and the witch was a vegetarian.

The final week of summer vacation we plan to skate, bowl, swim, snorkel, watch DVDs, read, finish up projects and do some new crafts.

In upcoming posts, I'll share some of the kid's summer goals and their thoughts on summer.