The other day a friend asked me if Newt and I were enjoying our summer off from school. I hadn’t really thought about it. Our schedule is more relaxed, mostly because we don’t have quite so many activities. But there is still a whole lot of learning going on at our house.
Newt is taking a new class: Family History with Grandma.

Every Monday afternoon, she spends a couple of hours at her grandma’s house learning about our ancestors. Grandma has created an account on ancestry.com just for Newt. Every week she comes home with great stories about her ancestors. One great grandpa was one of the rangers who found and rescued Smokey the Bear. Another helped build a coffin for the man who shot Billy the Kid.
Newt is gaining a greater connection to her family, both living and gone. Grandma is a widow. The last couple of years have been difficult for her. Suddenly, she feels like she has something of worth to pass on. These lessons are good for both of them.

We’re reading like crazy. Since Newt has been so interested in farming, we read a couple of great books about what farm life was like in olden times. First, Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers, by Ralph Moody. I can’t say enough about how good this book is. Maybe I should just tell you what Newt said about it, “It’s life changing. I learned so much from it. It has become a part of my heart.”
This book enabled us to have conversations about all kinds of wonderful life lessons, from being trustworthy to working hard to dealing with difficult circumstances and what it means to become an adult. Plus, we both sobbed, sobbed through the entire last chapter; it’s that powerful.
We also read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy, which offered some great comparisons and contrasts. To Little Britches. Newt’s favorite part was when Almanzo’s father taught him that money is just a symbol for the work it takes to earn it. Then he gave Almazo fifty-cents and told him he could treat his friends to lemonade or use the money to buy a piglet, raise it and sell if for profit. Newt was glad he bought the pig, since she has been working with piglets on the farm.
The last few weeks, we’ve been enjoying the Dear America Series. We like to listen to the audiobook versions in the car. Our favorites so far are The Winter of Red Snow, about a girl living in Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War and Across the Wide and Lonesome Prairie, a fictional 13 year old girl’s Oregon Trail diary.
This series is funny, touching and informative. Great historical fiction.

Newt is not doing a whole lot of math, outside of the math she encounters in day to day life, but I certainly am. Have you discovered the Khan Academy? If you have kids – home, public, private or any other kind of schooled, you need to familiarize yourself with this website. It’s tagline is “learn almost anything—for free”. (It’s funded by Bill Gates and Google among others.)
Sal Kahn, the creator, has literally thousands of videos teaching math concepts (and science, economics and history) from as basic as place value all the way up to “Inverse Trig Functions: Arccos”. I haven’t the slightest idea what that means…
The fun part (wait, did she just say ‘fun’ about math?) is they way Khan has set up the practice modules. As you work, you earn points and badges like a video game. It’s a bit addicting.

Yes, those are my practice sheets. I used to think I hated math, it turns out, I love math, but I hated the way I learned it.
Newt is very interested in what I am doing, but I haven’t set up her account yet. I’m waiting until she really, really wants to. A bit of reverse psychology that has worked well in the past.
Come to think of it, our summer school looks an awful lot like our fall, winter and spring…

What about you, are you doing “summer school”? What kinds of things are you learning about?

Amazon affiliate links are on.  If you purchase any of the books I have
linked to, I get a small commission.  Neither ancestry.com nor Khan
Academy knows anything about me, this blog, or anything I might have to
say about them.  Sad.