Planning Summer Activities

What My Summer Plans Look Like.

Looks like the summer is officially here, even though you would not notice with the New England weather patterns. As of right now I will have a ton of projects to work on over the summer. This will be an interesting year of keeping busy.

This year will be hectic to say the least. Which "hat" to wear will likely change throughout the day. Here is a brief look at the family summer plans.

Our 9 year old will be going into the fourth grade and need to bring up her reading speed. Along with Tae Kwon Do practices that she will need to work on. Additionally she will be doing home schooling all summer to help compensate for her hearing loss. This means speech therapy every day. In addition to this it seems that her school is no longer teach cursive handwriting, which we want her to learn so it looks like we have to teach her. 

At 9 years old she is also going to start learning much more about standard computers and not just Ipads. So looks like she will be using Typing.com to learn to use a standard keyboard. She took an interest in Minecraft last year. Since I also enjoy playing it, I figured maybe she would like to learn more of the technical aspects to a game. Showed her the http://Tynker.com site, which is a coding platform, and she loved it. I wish I had block programming with games like this when I began using computers. 

For several science related topics for her to learn I am going to let her learn how to build and assemble a computer from the ground up. Since she needs one anyways this becomes a great learning experience as compared to just buying one and slapping it on a desk. 

Looks like I hope to include a bottle rocket experiment this year as well. She has shown a great interest in science during this past year by being involved in the Brain Boosters program at her local school. She loves the activities she has learned about and the teacher and helpers have been wonderful. 

Along with all of the above she will need to keep up on practice with math skills, social studies, and the summer reading program. She pledged 900 minutes of reading for the summer. But that's not actually that much if you factor it out. We are so proud of her for working so hard to overcome her hearing loss. 

She also took a liking to dance this year. She is just giddy for GoNoodle. What is nice is that she can now watch in on our TV. She just loves to play and dance with the videos. Even is she runs out of GoNoodle stuff to watch she can watch videos on YouTube where people have recorded things like Just Dance or other dance games. She will flip through those for hours. 

Also planning to see if her balance has improved enough to ride a bicycle this year. Having hearing loss in only one ear had been a big part of her lack of coordination. We take for granted such a simple thing as balance. 

She is still deciding on what type of musical projects she would like to do this year as well. She has a keyboard, some drum pads, and love to sing. Although her tones are off and her speech needs work, I was considering the best ways to get her into a vocal program. I believe that singing would help to improve those other areas (speech and hearing).

With all of this she still wants to do art projects because of an interest in fashion design. She loves to draw as much as possible. YouTube lessons on drawing and creativity have been a blessing for this. So many talented people out there sharing information. I am glad to be part of the global free knowledge community. 

As if this list alone wasn't enough, I still have all of my projects as well as my wife's projects. This should be an exciting and super busy summer. Hope we get everything done that we need to do. Wish us luck.