Homeschool Village ~ Refresh!

I’m participating in week 2 of the Homeschool Village meme.  This is a great way to meet fellow homeschool moms, and to glean from them.  This week’s topic is ---

What do you - homeschool mom - do to get refreshed for the next school year?

With the exception of Ashley’s research paper, our school year is complete!  We normally take a month to 6 weeks to regroup and have a break.  That’s refreshing! 

This week, we’ve been working on putting our portfolios together.  I know, to a lot of people, PA homeschool laws seem very strict.  To me, not having anything to compare it to, I think they’re fairly simple and straightforward.  I’m actually glad that we are required to do portfolios.  We actually set stuff aside throughout the year that we know we’ll want to include in our portfolios.  Then, when the year is done, we put everything in order, I get out my handy-dandy comb-binding machine (which I would highly recommend), and we set to work putting the portfolios together.  The finished product is keepsake-quality.  We store all our portfolios on our bookshelf, so we can pull them out and look at them whenever we want to.  That’s refreshing!

I will spend some time over the next few weeks making sure that we have everything we need for our next school year.  Aside from picking up a Greek book for Ashley, I think we should be all set.  I’ll stack everything up, read all the introduction materials, and start making each girls’ weekly planner forms for this next year.  Because I’m a bit of a planning freak, that’s refreshing!

Getting away is always nice and we did that 2 weeks ago when we had the opportunity to spend some time in Florida for the FPEA convention (and we snuck in some friend time and Disney time too – I’ve been posting pictures from this trip – so, if you’re interested, check out my previous posts).  Because my best friend recently passed away and we’ve experienced some other major life changes in this past year, getting away was very refreshing!

Now, I think I’ll go make some refreshing iced tea and read what other homeschool moms do to refresh over the summer!  You can too, by visiting the Layton Family Joy blog.