We’ve finished up our school year…mostly. I’m a mean mom and make my kids read, keep going with math, and practice music all summer. One summer, only one, we took off the whole summer and September was miserable! We spent the entire month trying to remember what they’d learned in math the year before. It was frustrating for all of us. So, learning from our mistakes, we do a couple days a week all summer.

Now that we’re mostly done, its clean up time! Once, long ago, my cousin said in her cute little voice, “in order to clean up you have to make a bigger mess first”. There’s some truth to that, although I don’t clean up the same way as my kids. But, I let them own it and go through their school shelf, sorting papers and getting rid of old things we don’t need anymore. There’s always lots of questions about what they should do with certain books and papers.

Once we’ve sorted, trashed, recycled, and made lots of decisions, we end up with a stack for each kid that we want to save.

Each of my children have a storage container that we keep their work in. Each year we add to it. I really don’t know what we’ll do with this boxes, but for now we have them. I guess with two graduates this year, we should pull them out and look through them!

The school shelf looks really nice once we’ve cleaned out… for about a day. Somehow these shelves are always getting messed up and quickly!

Summer is in full swing here with the garden, raspberries, baby goats, and all sorts of projects! Plus the pool is warm and clear and tempting! Getting my kids to do a little math is sometimes excruciating, but I know it’s good for them! We try to just get it done early so we can have the rest of the day to work outside and play outside!

We love summer and freedom that comes with it, but we also see the value in taking advantage of the extra freedom to dig into things we didn’t quite finish during the school year. Make the most of your summerwith a balance of work and play and your “autumn self” will thank you!