Weather and Montessori homeschooling

Well, it's hit again this year--the nice weather, which means the kids have no desire to work whatsoever as their seasonal internal clocks have gone into summer mode. It's been REALLY nice weather and it's hit earlier--but we still have 6 weeks of school left. Our Montessori homeschooling may be done for the year, but their schooling is not. Horrible, aren't I?

I remember well the past two years--everything kind of fell apart and the things that were really important to get done the last month were very hard to get done. Part of it is that our routine is thrown off with school meetings, field trips, wanting to make the best of nice weather, etc. My instinct and experience tell me that I need to rein them all in or I'm going to lose them completely. So, I'm implementing a schedule.

*gasp*

I haven't figured out quite yet what I'll do. While I might usually work with them to determine things, when they get to the stage they are at, they don't want to think about things like that anymore. I think each child will have a different schedule: the oldest has math, writing and French to focus on, her brother has writing, reading and math to focus on (in order of importance), the almost 10yog really needs to work on spelling/writing and reading and dd, well, I think I'll sit down with her this weekend without so many distractions and we can talk about what sort of things would be good things for her to work on during our work period. My main idea is this:

We already have silent reading from 8 to about 8:20-8:30. From 8:30-9:30, that will be their 'must work on this' time. At 9:30, a quick break/snack, then I will lead them in activities that I need to figure out. :D Things like:

• SOTW (I recently had the idea to actually the kids make the people we have been learning about and perhaps some scenery stuff to act things out),
• science experiments/activities/read-alouds,
• learn the provinces and capitals of Canada,
• literature read-aloud (we've been working on the Shadow Children series),
• French read-aloud,
• Spalding work
• educational games (auditory work, math facts, spelling, etc.)--hey, I should have THEM come up with some games!
• Shakespeare (we usually do this in June when they're in summer mode, but as I said above, they've hit summer mode early),
• figure out some sort of projects to do outside in the yard,
• work on ICPS, Moral Intelligence, other things like that,
• have class meetings,
• do cleaning, baking,
• art, crafts...
• I'll invite them to come up with other ideas for the following week's schedule

Lots of ideas, but I have to plan them out or, as experience has dictated, it will be chaos. This is actually energizing me! Perhaps I have needed more structure than I realized. :D