Our Holiday Homeschool Plans | Christmas School 2024 | Homeschooling thru the Holidays

[Music] hey everybody Welcome to the wock way I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be all about our Christmas homeschool plans in case you're new here Christmas schooling as we like to call it has been something I have done with Emily as long as I can remember I'm thinking about kindergarten and what that means for our family is that we take from Thanksgiving until New Year's and we just do Christmas school so typically that means setting all of our regular curriculum to the side and focusing on the holidays I started doing this when I was in College full-time and we had like finals school with Emily all of the holiday stuff and Kevin said you seem really overwhelmed maybe you should take something off your plate and obviously I couldn't change the dat of the holidays and I couldn't change College finals so homeschool was the thing that we changed and I thought we weren't doing school at all at that time we were just reading books and playing games and having fun baking and all that stuff um but it turns out that Emily still learned a lot and after that I was like that's it I'm sold from now on from Thanksgiving till New Year's we are not doing anything except Christmas schooling this year I wanted things to be a little bit simpler than years in the past I didn't want to have a ton of stuff because as Emily gets older I find that the conversations are the things that uh we tend to learn the most through and enjoy the most and so I really wanted to keep things sweet and kind of simple and make sure that I was leaving tons of room for her to explore and for us to have those deep meaningful conversations so our Advent things that we will be using are this eight tiny reindeer and Advent calendar Adventure now this is actually a graphic novel so this is something that I will be leaving out uh for Emily to do each and every morning it has uh I think it's just like two or three pages you can see here it says December 1st and then there are let's see one two three pages before it gets to December 2nd so she'll only be reading like three to four pages a day but I'll just be leaving this out strewing it for her if you will each and every day and then as part of our morning basket this year we will be doing the Advent story book we've done this one before it's 25 Bible stories showing why Jesus came it is probably the one we enjoy the most it's the simplest all I need is the book each day you just have one page reading here and then um like a discussion question so that is what we will be doing along with that we are going to do an advent Carol countdown this book has 25 Christmas Carol and the story behind them so each day has the song along with the lyrics and then a little bit more kind of about the lyrics um there's also a QR code you can scan to watch the musical performance I am probably just going to ask our DOT to play it um because it's just easier she sits right next to us where we do morning time so I'll probably just say like hey can you play this song we'll listen to it and then I'll read the story behind it I also grabbed Emily these minute Christmas Mysteries we have had the regular um short stories for young sleuths in our morning Basket in the past and so I thought picking up the Christmas edition would be fun there are 15 of them but I think I counted we'll actually only be doing uh Christmas school for like three full weeks so I think this is actually going to end up being one each and every day and then in addition to that we grabbed mad lives in Spanish this is going to be fun um Emily has been doing duelingo Spanish for the past two years maybe three she's much better at it than I am I just started doing it with her this past year because she just wanted somebody to do it with um so we decided since we've done mad lips for years why not make it a challenge and mix in some foreign language I'm sure this is going to be a lot lot of me looking at words to see what they mean but either way it will be fun um and we will be mixing in language arts and foreign language and then the last Advent thing that I have that we will be doing like every day during our morning basket time is this 24 jigsaw puzzles so there is a little window for each of the 24 days leading up to Christmas each puzzle is 50 pieces um so Emily will pretty much get her 50 pieces out and do that while I'm reading aloud to her each and every day the read alouds that we have chosen to do this year are Christmas Carol and the Defenders of Claus um I'm going to read you the summary of This Book because that's what sold Emily on it she's the one who picked our read aloud this year it says uh Carol really loves Christmas the decorating shopping the Christmas sweaters and music she wishes it could be a year- round event the only downside of the holiday is that she lives in Florida not exactly the Land of Snow sound familiar uh basically she lives with her Uncle who adopted her after her parents died or her father disappeared in her mother's death her uncle is a workaholic on a magical December trip to New York City Carol meets her Destiny Santa the real man with the bag at the top of the rockefella center overlooking the tree he explains that Carol is a descendant from a long line of Defenders of claw those who protect and serve Santa Carol's dad was also a Defender and now Carol has been tapped to fulfill his legacy see so that is kind of the story behind this book that's why Emily picked it I don't expect us to finish the first one in enough time but in case we do I did go ahead and pick up the second book in the series which is Christmas Carol and the shimmering elf so that way if we do finish the first one we have the second one and then in addition to those another book we will be reading aloud is The Best Christmas Pageant ever because I'm so excited that they released a movie to go along with it really really excited we've read this multiple times but it's been a few years so I thought it would be fun to do this again but this is a short book so we'll have this one read probably in a week um so we'll have plenty of time to do our other readle outs now the things that we'll be doing in addition to that are The Best Christmas Pageant Ever novel study we had so much fun with our Christmas Carol one last year that once I realized they were releasing a movie for this it seemed like a no-brainer to design the novel study to go along with it so that we could enjoy it as much as we enjoyed Christmas Carol last year um and if you're reading the Christmas Carol and you need a novel study to go with it I'll leave a link to it in the description and then I had said I wanted a simple Christmas which is what I did I wanted a simple Christmas unit study um I love all of the ones we've done in the past but I just just wanted something a little bit shorter and more simple and so I created a 12 Days of Christmas unit study and it is exploring the traditional days of Christmas um traditional symbols of Christmas spending 12 days discovering them so it includes Christmas bells candy canes Christmas carols Christmas trees gingerbread mistletoe Nutcracker poetas Star of Bethlehem Santa Claus stockings wreaths so things that we've you know grown to symbol and like associate with Christmas and then for each of those 12 things there is a picturebook suggestion but it's just a suggestion so I don't even have to have anything extra because this is all I need um there is also a video that corresponds with each one of them on YouTube so you just scan the QR code and watch uh there is notebook paging notebook pages that she'll do and then there is a coloring page as well as a video um drawing tutorial depending on the age of the child which Emily will probably actually do both because she enjoys both of those things and then there are extra enrichment ideas for like an activity but they're not required so it means that I can just pull this off the shelf read the readings because I already wrote them um where we will talk about the origin the history and how the symbol is made and then have Emily color the coloring page do the notebooking page and do whatever the activity is I don't need extra things like I don't have to Source stuff I don't have to collect stuff we can just pull this off the shelf and have a simple meaningful Christmas where we're still learning about the history and the origin and how things are made so I'm really excited about that um because it will be simple now I told you that I think we're going to have three full weeks of Christmas schooling and and my plan is to do the 12 Days of Christmas four of those 5 days in the week so that means we'll get through all 12 probably like Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday of Week 1 two and three which means that we will have a fifth day on that fifth day we will be doing a recipe from Santa's tasty trip around the world um we have been working through this for years I let M pick three to four each holiday season because the idea of baking all of them in one season season is just not my idea of fun I'm not a baker not somebody who enjoys being in the kitchen a lot um so I have spread this out over the years if you too are like that sounds like a nightmare this is an amazing super fun curriculum we love it but don't try to do all of it at one time maybe you just do one every other day or one a week which is what we're going to do I will let her pick whichever one she wants to learn more about um we'll learn about the country we'll learn about Santa's stop there what he eats when he's stops there and then we will bake the recipe from that place so she will choose those and we will do three out of Santa's tasty trip around the world obviously we will also be reading a lot of Christmas picture books I already have them all here filled in my basket and we'll be playing a lot of Christmas games as well I will be sharing our CHR our favorite Christmas picture books and games in the next coming cple weeks hopefully next week so make sure you are subscri and turn on the Bell notification the last thing that I have that we will be doing with Christmas school is our brand new Christmas Discovery deck um this is just going to be something that I strew when Emily needs something to do when I need 5 Seconds to not be doing something with her um maybe that's during breakfast maybe that's while I'm cooking dinner but this will just be a fun way for her to learn things like why do we hang stockings at Christmas how is Christmas celebrated in Germany what are some of the world's coolest Christmas traditions um why do we leave cookies for Santa who invented the ugly Christmas sweater who invented candy canes um why do we give gifts on Christmas so just kind of like some fun history Traditions cultures some around the world kinds of things just a good mixture of everything and like I said all of these videos are under 10 minutes so it's just going to be when I need to buy us 10 minutes of something so that is it that is our simple but meaningful Christmas school plans for this year and now I would love to hear about your hom school do you do Christmas school and if so what are your plans [Music]