To be honest, I am basing this on what the students in our family do in the summer, but the basic premises can be applied to any student. For example, take number one.
1. One of our sons sang in a voice recital. Our family loves to sing, so we invest in voice lessons for the parents and two of our children. If your child has an interest in something, summer is a great time to get them lessons or supply them with materials to “feed” their interests.
2. One of our sons played in a piano recital. Ditto.
3. We got a new pet. The responsibility taken and knowledge gained is valuable for students. If you choose to do this one, make sure you have researched how to take care of the animal and plan to be responsible for it the rest of its life. We don’t take this lightly.
4. We planted trees. We are researching how to grow organic fruit. The sheep like to eat plum leaves, so we also spent some time putting up fences :-).
5. We remodeled a chicken coop. Here are the before and after pictures, as well as a hay feeder our family built using plans we found on the internet.
6. Our mechanically-inclined son attached a fan to a kick board and made it go around and around in the duck pond.
7. Our children love to sing, so we attended Shenandoah Christian Music Camp as a family, with all of us including the youngest singing in choirs. This is a vocal camp, but there was a keyboard to help us get our pitches, and on a break four of the singers managed to play a few measures of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Yes, it took four of them.
8. One of our sons learned how to unicycle. He’s been interested in this for awhile, and someone at music camp sold him one at a great price. He learned how to ride it in two and half days and loved it so much he even unicycled in the rain.
9. We saved a bird. This little one fell from the nest, as did his brother. After watching them all day, and seeing the brother die, we decided to try and save this one. He rode the train and thought that the crane was coming to feed him.
