A Homeschool Christmas

I love being able to homeschool during the Christmas season. When I was in school I remember always making a Christmas craft and doing a few Christmas art projects, singing in the Holiday Tea, and shopping at Santa's Secret Shop (even though the prices were ridiculous).

When I taught school we were not allowed to spend so much time on Christmas. We did sing a song every year for the parents and we did do one art project that maybe took up about 30 minutes of class time. However we had to turn in our lesson plans and we were required to spend so much amount of time each day on certain subjects. Thus "less important" things were not permitted. I always worked at those schools that were about to be taken by the government because of low test scores.

Well, I love being able to spend time on Christmas. Every day we learn about Jesus. I have the picture library box (I am not sure that is what it is called) from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and every day we look at one of the pictures of Jesus and read the summary on the back. We are going chronologically through the life of Christ. We are also memorizing a few scriptures relating to the birth of Christ.

I have a December activity book and I photocopied all of the projects so every day we spend some time either doing a Christmas coloring page, making Santa puppets, Christmas cards, etc. Also we have been making some homemade decorations. Today the kids strung beads on wire and made tree ornaments. Cassandra began sewing a gingerbread man by hand. They also painted some decorations.

We also have time to make Christmas treats. We made fudge with smashed candy canes. Little Felipe got out his hammer and he and Cassandra took turns smashing the candy canes in a ziplock bag. We are going to make sugar cookies with cookie cutters next week.

We have a lot of Christmas books so I put them all in a basket and we have been trying to read a little every night. I love Christmas movies though and so we have been watching a little more than usual. The ones we seem to watch the most are: A Jiminy Cricket Christmas and Walt Disney Christmas (if you put those two together you get the old Disney Channel Christmas from the 1980's), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, The Thomas and Friends Christmas Wonderland, The My Friends Tigger and Pooh Christmas and Baby Einstein Baby Santa. I think those are all of the Christmas movies we have. I also like It's a Wonderful Life, but it is probably too old for my little kids.

We are still doing our regular daily work but the goal for December is just to get maybe one workbook page done each day in each subject. That way they can get through their daily work in about an hour and have plenty of time for Christmas.