EP 10 A Masterly Summer
Spending the summer growing as a family spiritually, physically, and intellectually
“The busiest of us have holidays when we slip our necks out of the yoke and come face to face with Nature, to be healed and blessed by
"The breathing balm,
The silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things."”
Charlotte Mason, Home Education, Page 50
As summer beckons us with her long days, late nights, and leisurely ways, let’s pause to consider a few questions before it melts away and the new school year is before us. What is a person and how are they formed? How ought we spend our time this summer? How does this time form us? What do we owe to our children these summer days? What, before the Lord, should we consider before one day melts into the next with delicious rest and rejuvenation?
As I first began thinking about summer, my first thoughts were on all I wanted to do and accomplish: read in quiet, work on projects, and spend time outside. I began to plot my attack on the various spaces that need to be purged and reordered. But, then it occurred to me that my seven children would be lazing about without direction or a plan whilst I productively plod away at my work. They would be doing one thing and I would be doing another. It didn’t really sound like a great plan for success. I would be duly occupied, but my children would be, well, feral.
Ms. Mason helps us remember our duties to our children. We can begin, instead of looking at what we want to do, we can consider what we ought to do and work outwardly from a place of joyful responsibility before the Lord. We find our freedom when we understand our boundaries. I know that sounds a bit boring, but stick with me because it really brings life to the whole endeavor. Consider a captain of a ship. He has spent much of his time learning the art of navigation. He knows where the ship is going and is responsible for getting everyone there safely. It is he who holds the responsibility of rationing the food and organizing, hiring and delegating the work on the ship. When things go wrong on the ship, it would be absurd for him to come down from the bridge and attend to every little detail - he is an overseer and is plotting the course for the whole voyage, if he comes away from his post, the rest of the ship would suffer. So it is with the mother as the captain of the home and family life. We need to be able to consider the course we are going on for the summer and set out to train each member accordingly. Our work doesn’t stop, just because it’s summer, it changes. But we can use summer to grow areas of weakness or challenge our strengths. It’s an opportunity for growth, but that won’t happen without being thoughtful about each child and giving them tools for success.
“Let me say that the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions––a running fire of Do and Don't; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way, and grow to fruitful purpose. The gardener, it is true, 'digs about and dungs,' prunes and trains, his peach tree; but that occupies a small fraction of the tree's life: all the rest of the time the sweet airs and sunshine, the rains and dews, play about it and breathe upon it, get into its substance, and the result is––peaches. But let the gardener neglect his part, and the peaches will be no better than sloes (a sloe is the fruit of a blackthorn). (p 134, Home Education)
Let’s look at three areas to consider as mother-teachers so that we can come into summer with a plan for thriving and growing together. First we will look at the mother’s duty to reflect on each child and help them come up with goals and a plan for developing skills and interests over the summer. Then we will plan out chores and routines to communicate the duties and responsibilities of each member of the household. Finally, we will look at how these habits and rhythms will fit into our family life to make it a refreshing summer.
The duty of the mother begins with knowing our children and that means we need to be students of them. We apply our intellect toward each child so that we can think about their strengths and weaknesses. Socrates reminds us that “the unexamined life is not worth living." That goes for family life. Reflection is key to growth. We can carve out time to consider the people in our home, how the school year went and what areas of growth we see in our children. An end of year reflection can happen over the course of a week, or in one afternoon depending on the number of children you are thinking about. This is deep work and takes time, but it reaps the fruits of helping to guide and direct our children, so it is well worth the effort.
I think through each child “in the round” and consider their moral and religious life, their physical development and their intellectual development. It’s helpful to review what ground has been covered in the past term and focus on the successes. Once the areas of growth have been acknowledged and celebrated, then we can look at one opportunity for developing their weaknesses. I learned this practice from Celeste Cruz at the CMEC. Celeste created a guide that includes reflection questions for mothers. (You can purchase the training that includes more details about the role of reflection and getting students to work independently in the 2018 Retreat Package here for all of the details, talks, charts and training. It’s worth every penny.)
Another form of reflection is asking our children how the year went, what subjects they enjoyed and what they’d like to work on during the summer. Here are some questions you may consider:
What were your top three favorite books from this year?
What was your easiest subject and why?
What was your hardest subject and why?
What area(s) would you like to improve in next year?
What habit would you most like to work on this summer?
What new skill would you most like to learn this summer?
These questions help us hear from our children in ways that may surprise us. They give insight into how they see their school life and also help them reflect on ways they’d like to learn and grow. The key is that they think about how they’d like to govern themselves for the summer which takes the burden off of the mother. In this way, the mother becomes a coach and a guide helping them accomplish their goals.
With all of this information gathered, we can then spend time working with each child to plan out their summer, find out what supplies they need and how they will spend each day. This helps to set the expectations for older children and helps mothers, as captain of the ship, see what areas need to be considered for younger children.
Once we understand the areas of focus for each child - and they’ve had input about what they’d like to learn and develop for the summer, we can come up with a daily and weekly routine to help meet those goals. Summer is the perfect opportunity to practice masterly inactivity - which isn’t just free play without purpose but is a quiet letting alone (which comes after training or offering an inspiring idea). We’ve taken the time to prune the tree, as Mason puts it, and now we are giving space for the sun to shine and the rain to fall.
The way I manage communicating my expectations is with a checklist. I’ve linked to the google document of our summer checklists here so you can get an idea of what it could look like. We are starting the 1000 hours outside challenge, so I’ve included their daily outside time on each child’s checklist. You can find trackers over on the 1000 Hours Outside website. The details for the checklist aren’t as important as communicating expectations for the duties each child is expected to fulfill each day. These boundaries help everyone have more freedom throughout the day. This way if a child would like to indulge in a book, play with friends or work on a special project, those things can be done within the context of their daily responsibilities to themselves and the family.
What’s fun about making goals and tracking them during the summer is that when the family takes a day and heads to the mountains, beach or other fun activity, the change in routine is restful and more satisfying than if everyday is lazing about with no purpose. Summer is the perfect time for training the family to use their afternoon occupations well and to number our days together.
On each child’s list, I include a time for them to do their Zone cleaning (linked to Google Doc with our Cleaning Zones). This is an area of the house that they’ve been trained to keep clean each day. We’ve had variations of this through the years, but as our children have gotten older, they are able to take on more responsibility by caring for a specific area of the home. In this way, they are free to do their cleaning at any point during the day and that usually satisfies the requirement, depending on the space. The key principle here is that children need to take part in caring for the home and this means they need chores. Chores give children a sense of belonging to the important work of maintaining the home. They are able to actively contribute to ordering the home and weaving peace into the fabric of the day through their chore work.
Even small children are able to contribute to the daily chores. Small children love to help and can be easily put to work by helping with taking small items to the trash can or sorting silverware or toys into bins. When a home is full of many small people, sometimes mothers can have a lot of guilt in not getting down on the floor and playing with those little ones. This is because there is so much work to do to keep the house humming. But we can remember that children love to do real work and love to do whatever we do. So, if you are cleaning the bathroom, you may find a trusty assistant ready to wipe the floorboards or counters.
Our chore routine is the backbone of keeping our home in order and weaving peace into our days. There are many ways to work out the chore systems in the home and I had to consider each child, whether or not they needed a more challenging chore to help them stretch and grow or if they needed an easier chore to work on thoroughness and consistency. It is a bit of a puzzle to put all of the needs of the home, times children are available and abilities into a cohesive plan. When I created our new plan, I had to work through it for a day or two in draft mode with everyone doing their responsibilities before I was able to print it off and post it for good. I’ve included an image of our chart below, and I’ll include a link to the Google spreadsheet1. You can just copy the document into your google drive to work on your own version if you find it helpful.
Now that we’ve gotten the habits and routines established for our summer let’s move onto the fun parts with all the joys and freedom we are ready to embrace! Mason again, “The busy mother says she has no leisure to (allow her child freedom to explore on his own), and the child will run wild and get into bad habits; but we must not make a fetish of habit; education is a life as well as a discipline. Health, strength, and agility, bright eyes and alert movements, come from a free life, out-of-doors, if it may be and as for habits, there is no habit or power so useful to man or woman as that of personal initiative. The resourcefulness which will enable a family of children to invent their own games and occupations through the length of a summer's day is worth more in after life than a good deal of knowledge about cubes and hexagons, and this comes, not of continual intervention on the mother's part, but of much masterly inactivity. (p 192 Home Education)
And here we are reminded of our role as mothers. Our children need freedom. They need time to move freely within boundaries. We don’t want to bark orders at every moment but operate freely as the ship’s captain works to get the ship to its destination, so we operate from a place of strength to set the course of the family toward growth and new knowledge. Mason can overwhelm me at times, I’ve thought that she placed too many rules and restrictions on me with her sense of “ought” and “duty,” but the fact is she is simply conveying the boundaries that are placed on us by God to care for and nurture our children in the “discipline and admonition of the Lord.”
And our summer is to be lived out “unto the Lord.” Each day is an opportunity to explore His creation and to worship Him through the work that we do and the activities we enjoy through our leisure time. Sloth and laziness are not the hallmarks of a glorious summer. Worship of God, praising and enjoying His world with our time and attention are at the heart of a summer well lived. The energizing force of summer for the Christian is rooted in divine worship. Without it we will devolve into dissatisfying idleness. As Christians we are energized by the divine love which pours into us by unmerited grace. We receive the gift and respond with worship. Summer is one way to recover what may have been lost by the busyness of the school year, we can come back into a restful enjoyment of these precious days we have with our children.
One way we’ve found to add a bit more fun and spontaneity into our summer is to create a bucket list of special things we’d like to do! We’ve included things like: hosting a barbecue, visiting the swimming hole, going out for ice cream, making homemade ice cream, making pickles, having friends over for a play date, exploring a new hiking trail, or going to a local attraction. Everyone has dreams and ideas for ways to enjoy the summer and the bucket list is a great way to fit that into our days with a sense of adventure.
I mentioned earlier that we are starting the 1000 hours Outside challenge. We also enjoy hunting for things in nature once we are outside. I put together the Screen Free Kids Get Outside Nature Challenge (see below for PDF) to give us a sense of purpose once we are outside. (All of these resources are linked below.)
We come to summer with our lists and goals and with the duty we have towards our children to encourage and instruct them along the Path of Life. But we can’t forget that the Holy Spirit is always at work apart from the mother’s careful plans. God loves our children and is at work in their lives in ways we can’t orchestrate or measure. It is He who energizes us with love for our children so that we want to do our duty towards them out of love and delight not burden and drudgery. It is a joy to serve the King of Kings. One way we get to do that as mothers is to chart the course for the summer and let our children flourish under the freedom of living out in the sun and wind. I hope your summer is filled with new discoveries, peaceful adventures and ordered freedom. Remember, it is for us to plant and water, but God gives the growth.
Thanks for listening to However Imperfectly this season! I will take a break for the summer and will be back with a new season in the new school year where we will walk through Charlotte Mason’s 20 principles and look for ways to apply them to our modern homeschools. I’ll be back in August with the new season!
This podcast is made possible by Nature Study Hacking.com. Learn how to get outside and use a nature journal. If you’d like some help getting started, download the first 12 free lessons on flowers to get you started! The packet to download is available below.
Listen to this article here:
Footnotes of all the documents and resources linked:
2018 CMEC Retreat Package: https://thecmec.org/2018CMECRetreatPackage
1000 Hours Outside Free Trackers: https://www.1000hoursoutside.com/trackers
Summer Checklist Editable Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NXbhOzuOg-UEImH2ZgK9H2Jffpk6CmTvzUppNtqXXlA/edit?usp=sharing
Zone Cleaning Checklists: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13mlP2ir0_54gvlBmMm6yQw_HCr06mqGIKV9FhnKIDQ0/edit?usp=sharing
Kitchen and Daily Chores Editable Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11KOf1TW3sJlkxiAkJSJpQxy0NPzdNbnMHkynqTwiM7w/edit?usp=sharing
Nature Study Hacking Guided Nature Study: https://naturestudyhacking.com/
Nature Study Hacking Get Outside Nature Challenge:
We have a similar set up during the summer. Though it often gets dropped right after a big trip for a while or while grandparents are visiting. I had to remind my boys to stop working on their stop motion videos to do their pet chores the other day.
Thank you so much for sharing your checklists for your children. I am trying to start some new chore habits and you have given me some ideas. I also liked the idea of asking my children what projects or skills they would like to learn. I think the results are going to be very fruitful. My 7 year old is off practicing juggling as I write this!