Summer Home School

Yeah don't overload such a young child with busywork in the summer. Let her play and explore outside! That is the most important thing at her age. 20 minutes max, and I wouldn't make her if it is nice out. An age appropriate cooking lesson is fun and educational, as well as many real life skills like washing dishes or windows.

i understand the push to keep kids working and focused year round, and the anxiety about kids losing ground over summer. i think it's a real phenomenon, and as a homeschooler, i kept my kids 'working' all the time.
but homeschooling is so different. i think kids really need a break from the strange focus schools give. the conventional wisdom is that kids need school to get ready for 'real life' but the truth is that school is about as far from 'real life' as it gets. it's become the norm for 95% of american citizens, but that doesn't make it any less contrived.
and very young children like yours need the release from having their brains 'on' in that fashion. so my suggestion is to take the opportunity that summer gives you to allow her to learn in a more organic, less organized fashion. allot a certain amount of time every day to reading, of course. i hope that happens every day, but in summer you can just wallow in it. do breakfast AND bedtime stories, and maybe some lazy afternoon under-the-trees storytime too! find a topic that interests her (or that you have a particular desire for her to learn more about) and use that as the focal point for a lot of natural learning. in education-ese it's called 'unit studies', but really it's just interest-based learning. it can be anything from astronomy to dairy goats to victorian fashion to jewelry-making, but within that subject, you can build all manner of formal subjects without the dreariness and drudgery of framing them within a curriculum.
take, say, medieval swordfighting. you can direct some of your reading toward it, through king arthur tales. you can work in some math by figuring out how many chain links go into an inch of armor, then calculate how much you'd need to make an entire suit. you can look at history by seeing how those particular swords came into being, and how they compare to lighter sabers and epees. you can do social studies by researching how knights fit into their communities, what it took to become one, what the advantages and dangers were. you can find a local SCA group and see if someone is willing to teach your kid some moves using boffer swords. you can put on a puppet show for the neighborhood or your family with a knight theme. you can go to medieval times for a field trip. you can practice hand-eye coordination by 'jousting' in your back yard with a ring or quintain. you can check out what types of horses were used for various types of medieval martial arts vs ladies' palfreys.
find the right topic, and summer will be too short to fit all the fun 'learning' activities in, but you won't have your poor kid stuck at the table doing math worksheets, KWIM?
khairete
S.

Check out Khan Academy. My daughter used to like to practice things she already knew.

I used to have my daughter practice math facts for 3 minutes a day. (Mad Minutes) and my daughters would read for at least a hour before bed time but that is all I made them do, it is the summer after all.

Personally I would just let her be a kid. She has the rest of her life to be in school.

Is she behind? If not, I don't see a need for such heavy review during the summer. I'd focus on 20 minutes of reading (an enjoyable book) and maybe 5 minutes or so of math facts.

Hi S.,

Do not overdue it and plan in keeping her brain active in a wise way so your child do not get burnt out. You don't want her to dislike studying and learning, you want her to enjoy learning and avoid Summer learn loss, right?
You will not need worksheets or sitting down routines for a long period of time like regular school. Make it FUN and INTERESTING doing:
nature walks,
zoo and museums visits,
reading programs/activities (library, group of children in the park, etc),
exploring the backyard and doing little research about ladybugs, butterflies or birds, for example.
drawings about things she has learned about the butterflies, for example.
I wouldn't suggest the use of a laptop...Your child will need lots of time outdoors. Do not use a schedule, do it "summerish", and enjoy the weather whenever is possible. Avoid at maximum the "electronics" otherwise she will get use too much to those which is not good.
Have fun yourself and encourage your child to learn by having fun!

I homeschool my first grader and I did a "three months on and one month off" year so that I wouldn't have to deal with a 3 month break in school work. However, we are ahead and already moving into a lot of second grade work, so I'm planning to keep it very light over the summer even though we're moving ahead.

The skills that are easy to lose ground on with long breaks are math and writing and reading. So rather than doing our difficult writing exercises very often, I'll let her do her handwriting workbooks a bit (she likes them) and write to pen pals and relatives (she likes that). We're moving into the next year's math because she can always go into more advanced math classes later or feel confident reviewing material she already knows. So a little bit of math workbook a couple days per week mixed with talking through daily math problems in natural life will suffice for you. And keep fun books to read in stock and have her read to you sometimes. Kids love educational books every bit as much as story books so she can learn a lot from educational reading you do as well as literature with good grammar and vocabulary content for bed time stories.

Keep it easy and not forced. A little bit per day several days per week is all it takes to maintain current knowledge. We don't do any electronics so far at all-so far the kids love books. When we're at the library and I'm getting books, the kids glom onto the computers and zone out on games. I'm sorry, they really don't learn anything. I don't let them do that at home. They absorb what we read about together in books WAY MORE than the library computer games. Carefully reading and discussing ONE educational book and asking her questions and having her tell you what she got from the book is worth way more than the same time spent on a computer. There are lots of studies backing this up. Sometimes a school day for us is just reading from a book for a while and letting the conversation go from there during the rest of our day. I'd designate the laptop as leisure time/tv time. It's the same thing until she gets older and starts using it for real research.

My grans (who live here since 2000) have always used the, 'scholastic' workbooks for summer, they enjoyed them so much that they simply would sit down and do them alone. They usually did them during, 'quiet' time when instead of taking a nap they had to, 'rest' for an hour during the craziness that summer entails!

I don't know if this is a strict enough schedule for you but I have always found that unless a child is required to go to summer school due to bad grades they need a break from school.

I suggest you try and make it fun. As well, being that this would be one on one, I would think she needs any more than 15 minutes per schedule, since it is repeat work.