Christmas School 2023
Every year we LOVE to do Christmas school! If you’re new to Christmas school or looking for some fresh ideas, I thought I’d share a some of our old favorites. Don’t miss what we’ll be doing this year at the end of the post!
Advent
The 25 Days of Christ is a tradition we have been doing for years. It helps keep our hearts centered on Christ every day through out the Christmas season. We begin on December 1 and do it part of our morning devotional time, but you could do it at any time of the day. I know a lot of people like to do it right before bed. Each day the kids take turns opening our advent bag and inside is an ornament that coordinates with a scripture. For example, day 1 is a star ornament and we read Luke 2:1-7. We also read a short story and watch a clip of the scene - which is all included on a reference guide in the kit.
If you’re looking to go all out with this tradition, The 25 Days of Christ comes in either two ornament kits - a finished ornament kit or an unfinished kit that your kids can paint and decorate themselves. (Make sure to grab my discount code below.) We have the finished kit, but I also love the look of a simple unfinished kit even without painting them all. There are 25 ornaments and like I mentioned there is a reference card that includes each day’s scripture to read. The kit also have The Good Shepherd Book which has an illustrated children’s version of the Christmas story paraphrasing the scriptures. I love to read this first so after when we read the scripture passage - my little kids have a visual of what is going on in the scriptures. We store the ornaments in the advent bags which I think are super cute and the kids absolutely love opening a new one each day.
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Previous Years
2019
During our first year homeschooling, we pulled our girls out of public school in mid-November. Of course I felt overwhelmed, but I remember this Christmas season being one of our best Christmases. My heart was SO full to just have extra time with my kids. Especially since I was just learning what I was doing, all we focused on was math and language arts and, honestly, the simplicity of that was absolutely wonderful. Since the holidays tend to be very busy (and often a lot of the work falls on mothers) don’t ever hesitate to take a light load and just focus on the basics.
2020
This year we put all our other curriculum on hold and I read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to my older girls. We did this Narnia unit study and to date, this is still my very favorite Christmas study we’ve ever done. It was magical. If you do this unit, I’d highly recommend Finding Narnia and A Family Guide to Narnia: Biblical Truths in CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.
2021
This was such a fun Christmas season. This is another year we took a break from our main curriculum and I went all out on our Christmas learning shelf and the kids LOVED unwrapping new Christmas activities each day. I have all the details on what I had on my shelves linked on this old blog post: Christmas School 2021. This year we were studying early American history so we also really enjoyed using An American Girl Christmas from Little School of Smith’s. I love anything and everything from her shop so be sure to check it out. My discount code will you get 10% off anything in her shop.
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2022
Last year I was feeling pretty burnt out so I decided to keep it real simple. At the beginning of the month we just did a light load of math, language arts, and a little bit of history. Then each day I made an effort to read from our Christmas book collection. We are nearing close to 50 Christmas books! If you want to browse our collection, I have them all compiled in my Amazon Storefront.
This Year: An Evergreen Study & The Nutcracker
As I mentioned last year I was feeling really burnt out - I had a lot of health issues going on and I just felt so overwhelmed with life. But, this year I have a lot more energy and am really excited for the fun things we have planned. So, I just wanted to point this out because it’s okay to recognize that there are different seasons of life. If you’re in a season where you want to go all out, take a break from your regular curriculum, and do all the fun things - do it! If not, don’t be afraid to take a step back and embrace that this isn’t the season for big projects.
If you’ve been following a long with us over on IG, you’ll know we’ve been loving our study of Seasons Afield. We took a break to focus on our Middle Ages study, but we’re picking it back up the week of November 13th and just doing one study - the “Evergreen” section. Since we’re still focusing on Middle Ages I’ll just be fitting this in when we can, but I really wanted to do it about the time we go get our Christmas trees. Every year we go hunting for them in the mountains so mid-November just felt like the ideal time for us to do this study. Originally, I had planned to do a few of the other "Secret Staircase” sections, but I decided to save these for January when we hopefully have more snow and it feels a bit more like winter and hibernation season. With our evergreen study we’ll be learning about conifer trees and pinecones as well as reading The Three Trees and The Year of The Perfect Christmas Tree.
BTW if you’re looking for a good science curriculum right now, I’d definitely recommend Seasons Afield. Since it’s broken up by seasons it’s still a perfect one to start mid-year because you can just start with the winter sections. In January we’ll be learning about the weather, ice, snow, hibernation, the lunar moon, and clouds.
After Thanksgiving we will be taking a lighter load with our main curriculum and focusing on a study of The Nutcracker! I’ve had this in the back of my mind for weeks because my youngest (4) LOVES The Story Orchestra version of The Nutcracker. Also, the Tchaikovsky Yoto Card is one my kids have on repeat all the time. I feel like the stars just aligned so perfectly because the Home & Haven Winter Theme Bundle (Volume 4) is Nutcracker themed this year! There are tons of math and simple language activities in this package for prek-3rd grade so we’ll be using lots of these activities through out the month with my younger boys.
In addition there is a 3 week Nutcracker Unit Study included in the bundle. So this is perfect to aide in our study as we learn more about Tchaikovsky and read different versions of the story. Ironically, I can’t tell you how well this study aligns with Seasons Afield too guys! There is a study of evergreens and pinecones included in the nutcracker study and there is also material all about mice (the mouse king) which also worked out so well because we’ve been reading from Brambly Hedge with Seasons Afield.
If you go with the Nutcracker unit study there are 4 books recommended to go with the unit:
The Story Orchestra: The Nutcracker (BTW this is on sale right now and definitely a great buy.)
Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers: Peter Tchaikovsky
The Winter Theme Bundle is also jam packed with lots and lots of Nutcracker themed learning sheets for early elementary. This time I sorted the activities by each of my younger boy’s academic level and then bound all of it together. You could also punch and put them in a 3 ring binder or staple them together if you wanted. This way we can just work through the book or tear activities out as we need them (like the puzzles). I made a really simple cover to go on each of their books - here is the free Canva template if you want to just change the name and do the same!
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For my older girls, they will be focusing more on a Tchaikovsky composer study and I am hoping to take them to a good performance of the ballet. I also grabbed them this cute Diamond Painting Nutcracker kit just for fun. They’re really into diamond painting right now and love to do it while I read aloud to them. I think we’ll tie them with ribbons and put them on a little Christmas tree that we keep in their rooms. Since they have a bit heavier core load this year I didn’t want to add any more or take too much time away from that work, but I am also planning to pull from our Art Makes Me Smart: Around the World materials for them because there are some great educational resources on Russia, Tchaikovsky, and The Nutcracker that will work good for this time of year as well. We’ve loved this resource so much! If we have time, I might squeeze in this cute Nutcracker art project as well.
I hope you all have a FABULOUS holiday season! Next week I’ll be sharing a newly updated gift guide so stay tuned! Happy holidays!
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