1,000 Hours, One Graduation, and a Summer Break!

Another school year has come and gone! And while I'm happy to have successfully completed another year of homeschooling, I have to admit that I'm still struggling with one particular aspect of homeschooling in Missouri: keeping track of those required 1,000 hours! It's not necessarily the schooling itself that's the problem. It's keeping records of everything the children are doing and making sure we're meeting the state's requirements. I'm beginning to think I may need to reconsider how we organize our school days and record our hours so that the process is a little easier on me. I've actually received some helpful advice from other homeschooling mothers at our church, so that's something I'll be thinking about over the summer.

For now, my focus is on wrapping up our current homeschool recording year, including any educational activities the children do throughout the rest of June. Then, beginning July 1, we'll start recording their summer activities toward our next homeschool year. We officially wrapped up our 2025–2026 school year on June 5, a little later than originally planned. We ended up needing an extra week to finish everything because of a few schedule adjustments and unexpected breaks throughout the year.

Many of those adjustments came from our family's journey into the Orthodox Church.

When I originally planned our school year, I had no idea just how many services and events we'd be attending! Between the Nativity season, Theophany and house blessings, Great Lent, and Holy Week, there were quite a few things I hadn't accounted for when putting together our homeschool calendar. Of course, I'm not complaining! It's been a wonderful experience, and I'm grateful we've had the opportunity to participate in so many things. But it certainly taught me something about planning our homeschool schedule! As we become more familiar with the Church's yearly cycle of services and celebrations, I'll hopefully be able to account for those days when planning future school years.

This year was particularly special because my daughter officially graduated from elementary school! I can hardly believe it. It feels like we were just beginning our homeschooling journey, and now I'm looking at having two middle schoolers next year! Where has the time gone?!

And of course, I wanted to make her graduation a little special, just as I did when my son completed elementary school. I designed a diploma and purchased a graduation cap, gown, and tassel so we could take some graduation pictures. Just because we're homeschooling doesn't mean we can't celebrate these milestones! It was a simple way to recognize her accomplishment and mark the end of one chapter before beginning another.

Something else I realized this year is that we've unintentionally created a little end-of-school tradition. Ever since we moved to Missouri, I've been taking the kids to Five Below on the last day of school and letting them choose one or two items as a small gift to celebrate successfully completing another year. I hadn't really thought of it as a tradition until now, but I suppose that's exactly what it's become! This year, we also ended up spending some time with friends from church and visiting a boba tea shop together. It was a fun way to finish the school year!

For anyone interested, I've also made the elementary school diploma available in my Etsy shop. Overall, I'd say we've had a good school year!

We've continued using Power Homeschool, and the program has been a huge help in keeping our lessons organized and moving forward. One of the things I appreciate about having an online curriculum is that it provides structure while still allowing me to make adjustments based on what my children need. Of course, there have been some changes to the program itself.

This school year, Power Homeschool introduced updates and raised its prices again.

Thankfully, we were fortunate enough to have a grandfathered-in rate from before the updates, which certainly helped! There was one additional requirement to keep that lower rate, though.

We now have to watch the weekly Science Live! videos every Wednesday. Honestly, I didn't mind that at all! It gives us an additional hour of educational activity each week to record toward our homeschool hours, and we've found ways to make it fit into our routine. Sometimes we'll listen to the presentation while eating dinner, and other times we'll have it playing while we're enjoying a board game together. It's actually worked out rather nicely!

Now that the school year is over, I'm beginning to think about what we'll need for the next one.

One feature I'm particularly grateful for is the availability of lesson syllabuses. Being able to look ahead at upcoming lessons makes planning so much easier. I can see what topics the children will be covering and prepare additional worksheets, activities, or practice materials for anything they might need extra help understanding. My goal is to plan at least the first half of the upcoming school year while I still have access to everything. That way, I can get much of the preparation out of the way before summer really gets underway. And once I've finished, I can pause our Power Homeschool subscription for the summer! I'm very grateful they offer that option because there's no reason to keep paying for the program while we're taking a break.

We also recently received an email mentioning that more changes will be coming to Power Homeschool over the summer. I'm curious to see what those changes will involve. Hopefully, they won't do anything to the lesson syllabuses again! A few years ago, changes to the program affected lesson plans I'd already prepared, and I'd really rather not have to go through the trouble of planning everything all over again. With elementary school officially behind us, I'll now be planning for a sixth grader and an eighth grader.

Two middle schoolers!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.

Besides preparing their regular academic lessons, there's something else I want to begin incorporating into our homeschool Bible class: Orthodox Christian studies. Since our family began attending the Orthodox Church, we've been learning so much about the faith, its traditions, and its teachings. I want our children to be learning alongside us, but the challenge, of course, is that I'm still learning myself! I can't exactly teach something I don't understand yet. So I've been looking for resources that will help me learn while also giving the children an opportunity to explore the Orthodox faith at their own level. Thankfully, with some help from Matushka, I've found several children's books and other materials that I think will be useful.

Another exciting possibility for the upcoming school year is adding our parish's church school to our schedule! Our parish offers church school on Fridays, and I'm seriously considering having the children attend. Not only would it give them another opportunity to learn about the Orthodox faith, but it would also allow them to spend more time with other children from church. I'd love for them to develop more friendships within our parish community. I'm also hoping that spending time in a classroom setting with our priest and other children might help them become more comfortable asking questions. Sometimes children are more willing to speak up when they hear other kids asking questions too! And who knows? They might ask something I hadn't even thought of myself.

If we decide to incorporate church school into our schedule, I'm thinking it might be the perfect opportunity to make Fridays an even more relaxed homeschool day. I actually tried to make Fridays a little lighter this past school year, but I'm considering taking that idea a step further.

Instead of following our usual routine, we could focus more on projects, educational games, videos, and other activities. I think that would be a nice way to finish each school week while still keeping everyone learning and getting those hours in without more serious work.

Of course, I'll have to see how everything fits together once I begin planning our calendar.

Once I've finished reviewing the upcoming Power Homeschool lessons and paused our subscription, I'll take a break from school things and rest my mind.

Then, I'm thinking about doing another unit study with the kids in July. Last July, we did an Independence Day unit study, and I really enjoyed putting that together. This year, I'm considering something a little different.

Ice cream!

Did you know that July is National Ice Cream Month? I think that would make a fun summer theme! We could learn about the history of ice cream, explore how it's made, and perhaps even incorporate a little science along the way. And, of course, what better science experiment could there be than making our own ice cream?! I think a unit study like this would be a fun way to keep them learning without feeling like we're jumping straight back into our regular school routine.

Sometime before we begin our next school year in September, I'll start working on the additional worksheets and activities we'll need. Hopefully, by spreading out the preparation, I won't find myself scrambling to get everything ready at the last minute. Although, knowing how things sometimes go around here, we'll see how that works out!