It’s summertime.  And the livin’ is easy…

But I’m not gonna let the livin’ be lazy.  My kids get up at the crack of dawn.  It’s not unusual for us to be up, fed, dressed and ready for the day by 7:30 – not because I want it to be that way, you see.  I would give a limb for them to sleep until 8:00 just once.  Heck, I’d be thrilled if they slept until 7:00!  So with everyone waking up so early, what on Earth will we do with ourselves all day everyday?  This week we started our summer schedule and built in to every weekday is “learning time” from 8:00-9:00.

It looks a little like this:

And Landon usually looks like this because I make him leave the room and play quietly by himself while the older kids work…something he’s not overly fond of.

This time is being spent on their Russian homework, Tia’s English Alphabet (poor girl, we’ve spent so much time on the Russian that she doesn’t know her English letters at all), Sloan working on his summer packet from school, math, reading and writing in their journals.  It’s actually going really well.  The kids are able to get all of their work out of the way early which frees them up to play the rest of the day.

We set a reading goal for Sloan this summer.  If he reads 10 books, we’ll go to Chuck E Cheese.  If he reads 20 books, we’ll go to the Magic House.  If he reads 35 books in English and 5 books in Russian we will spend the whole day at Six Flags.  So far he has completed one book and is chomping at the bit to go to the library to check out new books.

We’ll do that as soon as I pay off our overdue book fines.  Ahem… 

I think I’m going to like this schedule.  It’s tough, for sure.  I would much rather let them watch TV all morning so I could play on the computer, but I know this is a more productive way to spend these early morning hours.  It means I will have less time to blog, which is probably not a bad thing.  It will mean I need to be much more disciplined with my time, which is definately not a bad thing.  But it will also mean that I will be able to send Sloan to 1st grade prepared and Tia will finally know the difference between the letter H in English and the letter H (which sounds like N) in Russian.  It’s kind of important that I teach her that…

What are your summer plans?