Does School Ever End?

Last week was a great week:  our final week of school!  Yay!!!

In North Dakota we are required to homeschool for 175 days for 4 hours a day.  This comes out to 35 weeks and at the beginning of our school year I take a look at the curriculum and divide out the lessons so the children should get done within the 35 week time-frame   Then on week #36 we have "finals" week.  For math I print out the placements tests from Singapore.com, for spelling the final test includes all the words they got wrong during the year, history is usually quite a few essay questions, map work and a timeline which I write up and our science curriculum did have a final included so I didn't have to write that one up.  The rest of the subjects - grammar, Latin, writing, etc. - I did not give a final.

It felt so good to be "done" with school, but in actuality school never ends for us.  Now that summer is slowly arriving here in Fargo we will venture out and start botany.  Because how can one venture outside to look for plants when the ground is covered with snow for most of the school year?  My oldest is working on her Latin with an on-line group and they do not take time off for the summer. Also, my two older children will be learning how to type properly so they don't develop bad habits and they will be doing a typing class for the next few weeks.

One nice thing about summer is the pace slows down dramatically.  We can take our time working on the lessons and if something comes up which interrupts our lessons for the day it isn't a big deal.  We can enjoy the good weather while we leisurely work on the few subjects.  This is what I like about summer:  we still have a few classes, but the whole day isn't taken up by schoolwork and we have quite a bit more free time to just relax and enjoy the few precious months of nice weather.

There is a great lesson here which only happens for those who homeschool:  learning never ends. Now with that statement I have probably offended a non-homeschooler.  Yes, there are families who send their children to school and continue some sort of education outside of the school building, but the difference for families who homeschool is there is not a set date where the children are told "school is done - see you in the fall."  When I look back on my childhood and when school ended so did learning or at least in-depth learning.  And I struggle with this even now as I have an extremely hard time motivating myself to learn something new.  But I do not see this type of mindset in my children.  For them learning never ends; it either goes deeper into a subject or continues on another path.  I believe it also helps that our learning environment is not in a separate building, but in our home.  Therefore, our children do not associate education as something you do outside of the house.

And so, no matter what time of year our family is continually learning.  And to answer my question, "No, school never really ends here," but that is just fine.