104 Days of Summer Vacation

This week my youngest child discovered Phineas and Ferb, which means every afternoon for the past few days I have had to hear that there are "104 days of summer vacation." They must have a really great summer vacation that begins on May 26th and ends on September 7th. That's a long time. While summer breaks aren't that long, my children will be off from June 13th to August 25th or 74 days without a class. It's still a long time. A time in which they can still learn, change, and grow or the can drift, lose, and fall back.

Summer is filled with choices. For some families, the choice is to take a break from everything. They say they want their children to be children, run, play, socialize. For some it's classes, they want their child to learn new things they are interested in such as photography, coding, tennis, and cooking. For us, it's camps with swimming, community, skills, classes, and some religious living. The trick is while summer vacation can and should be all of these things and more.

Summer shouldn't be the intensity of 35 hour student work weeks with 90 - 120 minutes of nightly practice. However, it can't be learning free either. Reading and mathematics are skills that if you don't practice them they do go away. Just like my high school French classes. If I don't speak and read a little French now and then, I don't have the vocabulary or sentence structure to use them. The same applies in math. We need to practice some math skills each week or we will forget our trigonometric ratios and how to combine fractions. Skills learned during the year need a little love, care, and maintenance during the summer in order to be ready for next school year.

Summer can be a great time for reading. It's our chance to work with our children to find their "home run book." Selecting novels, comic books, or magazines that may interest them or make them laugh. You know, the ones we find them reading with a flashlight under the blanket. For my eldest, it means MAD magazines, Justice League comic books with "The Flash", and some Terry Prachett novels. For my youngest, well that's our job this summer. We haven't found his home run book yet. The one he wants to read all night and can't put down. Maybe will start with a Phineas and Ferb novelization. After all, they are always building things and he likes to build. There may not be 104 days in our summer vacation, but we can make the most of the days we have.

Phineas and Ferb