End of Year Homeschool Review
I like to end the homeschool year with a Review block. We take two weeks (three if we’ve had a crazy year!) and use our main lesson time to wrap up, review, and celebrate our year of homeschooling together. I made an End-of Year Review Planner to help you reflect on your homeschool year and make a plan for your own review block (it’s free for you to download and print...see the end of this post for details).
I’m a firm believer in a nice long summer vacation, and summer is a-calling. But I think it’s important to close out the year with intention rather than just fizzling out.
A Review Block is an opportunity to wrap up loose ends and projects from your year, get everything tidied up and put away, and officially call your homeschool year complete. It also creates space to acknowledge all of your child’s hard work, growth, and learning!
Just as important is taking some time to acknowledge and let go of the ways your year didn’t go to plan. Maybe you just had an insane year (like me this year) where life often got in the way of homeschooling and you don’t feel you measured up. Or maybe you just had a normal year with the very normal experience of not getting to everything you wanted to.
Regardless of how your year went, you still had many successes this year! It’s a worthwhile exercise to look both those shortcomings and successes in the face before you move on with planning your next year. It’s especially important to give yourself permission to let go of anything you won’t have time to complete this year. Let go of it so you can have a fresh start next year.
Here are some of the things you might like to do to prepare for an end-of-year review block:
Make some quiet time to reflect and journal on your past year of homeschooling. Take note of the successes and lessons learned while it’s fresh and consider what you’ll carry with you into the next year.
Consciously acknowledge the challenges of the past year and anything that feels incomplete.
Make a realistic plan to complete a few of the most important projects or objectives from the year and let go of the rest.
Then with your child here are some ways you could review and close out the year:
Look through and admire all of your child’s wonderful work from the year!
Remember the highlights of each main lesson block together.
Review main concepts or key skills from the year.
Add any finishing touches (title pages, borders, finish incomplete pages, etc.) to main lesson books.
Finish up projects.
Tidy up and put away all your homeschool supplies for the summer.
Organize an exhibition for your child to show off her work from the year to special relatives (projects, main lesson books, music learned, etc.).
Put all the main lesson books, art, and other work from the year neatly away in a storage box or portfolio.
Plan a special celebration for the end of the year!