While students enrolled in traditional private or public schools typically have the summer off, students who are home-schooled can have varied schedules, depending on the needs of each family.

In Butler County, some home-schooled students have the summers off and others have a modified summer schedule, with a shorter break than the usual summer, or shorter, lighter workdays.

Home-schooling mother of four Kelly Hanson said she gives her children a traditional summer vacation, giving them time to socialize with the children in their Sarver neighborhood and allowing her to work on future lesson plans.

“I just try to give the kids a really free summer and do as much of the work (myself) now to get ready so I can just focus on teaching when we get to the school year,” Hanson said. “That just makes it easier on me and easier on them. I want them to have freedom to just be kids during the summer and not worry about being students.”

To prepare, Hanson does research on curriculum and evaluates what worked best the year before with her children and what did not.

Hanson said she uses a number of different resources for her planning, including podcasts, other home-school families, and Websites like Brave Writer, Savvy Homeschool Moms and EduSense.

“I mostly look at my kids and see how they respond to different things,” she said. “My oldest is all about the stories. So I ended up using a math curriculum that uses stories to explain math, and that’s really worked for her.”

During the planning process, Hanson also tries to include her children to find out what and how they enjoyed learning.

For instance, her son who is going into second grade has a love for bridges, and passions like that, Hanson has found, make her children more excited about learning.

“My son is really into building things right now, so the last quarter of school last year, he worked on a bridge project,” she said. “We looked at all of the different types of bridges, we watched videos on them, and we went to visit some of them ... I didn’t know what a truss bridge was before.”

Hanson serves as the treasurer of the Butler Home Education Network, a cooperative for home-school students, and she said the co-op helps her diversify her children’s experiences and classes.

“We try to offer a lot of different opportunities for our students, and we try to take advantage of the gifts and skills of the other parents,” she said. “We have some parents that really like teaching art, and to them, I say go for it because I sort of hate teaching art ... That means I don’t have to do it at home.”

Some families find that a modified summer school schedule works best.

Heidi Cook of Mars has five children, and she still home-schools three of them.

But rather than nix an educational schedule altogether during summer, her two secondary level children and one elementary level child continue working on their core subjects, albeit with less work.

“Scheduling is definitely more regimented during the regular school year, from September until April,” Cook said. “In May, we go into a modified summer curriculum. It’s a little bit of a lighter load, three to four days a week.”

During that time, Cook said she has her children work on their weaker skills and do SAT preparation, but that still leaves them enough time for summer activities like being camp counselors. “Of course, the high schoolers aren’t always saying, ‘Oh yeah this is great,’” she said, but regardless, the children do the work with minimal complaining.

For her children, continuing some level of education and review has helped in the long-run. “In the years past, we have taken a break ... we found it would often take a six- or eight-week period at the beginning of the year to get them back into it, re-engage those brain cells, review the material,” she said. “Their competency declined with that break ... that’s when I decided that we would continue on to some degree in the summer and that really has worked the best overall.”

That makes the transition back into a full-time education schedule in fall much easier, she said.

By state law, home-schooled children are required to have the same number of educational days, 180, that public and private schools must have, and continuing education in the summer gives Cook’s family some leeway during the regular school year.

“It makes it less burdensome or stressful to get in the days required by law,” she said, providing a “margin for downtime” or other things like family emergencies or travel.

Another approach is something in between: a shorter summer vacation to prevent the children from losing the knowledge they learned.

Rebecca Wassam of Butler is the executive director of the Butler Home Education Network and the mother of five children.

“We typically finish up the home-school year around the end of May,” she said. “Then we kind of take a little bit of a break in the summer, and then we get back into things around July 1.”

Like Cook, Wassam said she doesn’t want the kids to regress. “We don’t want to take too much down time,” she said. “We don’t want them to lose the information that we taught them. It kind of helps with keeping things still fresh in their mind.”

With June off, the children are still able to “take a break to breathe,” Wassam said.

Then, when the children start back up, they’ll spend a few weeks reviewing the information. About this time in the summer is when Wassam’s children are ready to start moving on to new material, she said.

Despite not having a break as long as their public school peers, Wassam’s children seem to enjoy the summer as much as other children, especially by staying involved with activities like the Butler Farm Show and 4-H. “Life keeps going so we keep going,” she said.