Our Past 5 Years of Christmas School
Next week I’ll be sharing about our plans for our 2024 Christmas School. If you’re new to Christmas school it is a time where many homeschoolers set aside or lighten their core load of work to focus more on learning about Christ or doing some fun Christmas-themed learning units.
Over the last five years we’ve done everything from going all out to keeping it super simple so I thought I’d highlight some of our favorites.
First off, I wanted to share that the author of one of my favorite Christmas books, See Christ in Christmas, reached out and has graciously offered you guys 20% off her book. I read this one every year with my kids because it talks about 12 of the simplest holiday symbols - stars, bells, candy canes, presents, wreaths, ect and explains how they can remind of us of Christ.
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Advent
Over the years, we have loved pulling from The 25 Days of Christ. This set comes with 25 days of ornaments (you can get a finished ornament kit or an unfinished kit that your kids can decorate). There is also a reference card that includes each day’s scripture to read and usually a short clip on Christ’s life to watch. The kit also comes with The Good Shepherd Book which is an illustrated children’s version of the Christmas story paraphrasing the scriptures. I love to read this first so after when we do read the scripture passage - my little kids have a visual of what is going on in the scriptures. We store the ornaments in these advent bags which I think are super cute and the kids absolutely love opening a new one each day.
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2023
Last year we were using the Season’s Afield Curriculum (which we LOVED and you can see my full review here) and there is an Evergreen unit which fell right at Christmas time so it was perfect to make apart of our Christmas school. If you’re looking for a fun science curriculum you could totally start it now and jump into their winter units with Brambly Hedge.
We also did a study of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker which came out this volume 4 2023 Winter Bundle. If you go with a Nutcracker study this is our favorite version of the book and we absolutely loved doing these cute Diamond Painting Nutcrackers. I also grabbed the cutest mini nutcrackers at Hobby Lobby for the kids to paint.
I also didn’t plan this, but the kid’s decided they wanted to make Christmas cards for their church leaders and some of our extended family. We just folded some card stock and used tutorials from Art Kids Hub to make the cards and I think they turned out so cute and it ended up being a great writing activity.
2022
In 2022 I remember feeling super burnt out so I just kept it really simple (which I am totally giving you permission to do if you’re feeling the same way right now). But, we just did our favorite family traditions like decorating gingerbread houses and reading lots of Christmas books. If you want to browse our Christmas book collection I have a whole list here on my Amazon Storefront: Our Favorite Christmas Books.
Our family also has deep Scandinavian roots so our traditions and projects always seem to come back to Saint Lucia even though we’ve never done a formal study of her. This year we also did some fun holiday painting tutorials which all came from The Watercolor School. (I have more details on the art school program we use which you can read here: Lily & Thistle Art School.)
2021
This was such a fun Christmas season. 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
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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.
A few years ago I also read Once Upon A Wardrobe which is also a great book to go along with the study especially if you have older kids that are already familiar with CS Lewis.
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.
And, that wraps up our last few years! I hope you found this post helpful and it might spark some fun Christmas-themed ideas for you. Have a happy holiday season!
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