While I didn’t plan to take a couple weeks off for “Christmas Break” (because at this age, my children thrive off the structure of school time!) we did have a very lite December as far as our structured learning goes. The first two weeks of December our workload was pretty much the same, but then after that, we took several days off here and there (never consecutive days) and enjoyed a couple weeks of lite work. It was a nice “break” without everyone having a free-for-all for 2 weeks!

Language Arts

We’ve completed a couple more All About Reading Level 1 lessons but mostly I just had Little Bug practice her reading by reading some beginning readers we had checked out from the library. Little Bug completed A Reason for Handwriting K! We carved out a lot of time for Read Alouds. Read Alouds are a favorite time of our homeschool for all so it was very nice to have some extra time for curling up together to enjoy a good book. The girls are really into the Magic Tree House books. They beg me to read those books all the time! We could easily read a book a day if we took the time to do so! We read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and while there were some lines I had to skip or substitute a word for, the girls enjoyed the adventures of the Herdman children who unexpectedly join the Christmas Pageant!

Sweet Pea continues to enjoy her Measured Mom Handwriting pages. She has also really improved her letter writing by practicing with her Dry Erase books. The one pictured below is an Elmo Dry Eraser book that I picked up at the Dollar Store. We got Melissa and Doug Magnetic Letters and Numbers this month and Sweet Pea has used the letters to match uppercase to lowercase letters.

Math

We’ve worked on drilling these basic addition facts into Little Bug’s mind! Math Factory (the game her Daddy made for her!), timed fact sheets (from Saxon Math 1) and making a Lapbook of all her facts have helped her memorize these facts. After the New Year, we will begin the Subtraction Basic Facts using Saxon Math 1.

For preschool with Sweet Pea, we continued with the printables and activities I used with Little Bug 2-3 years ago. It was fun pulling them all out again and seeing Sweet Pea enjoy them. We had fun with Gingerbread, Snow/Winter and Christmas Fun! We also spent a lot of time reading our favorite Christmas stories!

Classical Conversations

During our Christmas Break from Classical Conversations, we have done some fun activities on our own with some of the Memory Work.

Week 1 Science: Classification of Living Things – I wrote the classifications on legos and they stacked them in order.

Weeks 1 & 2 History: Ten Commandments (with Mirror Image) – Kids painted one side of the tablet and then pressed it onto the other side to get a mirror image. I printed the 10 commandments and they glued them on the other side of the tablet. We also colored a fish and then made it’s backbone using q-tips.

Weeks 5 & 6 Science: Invertebrates and Vertebrates – We used extra pictures of animals from on of the science activities at Community Day and categorized them.

Week 9: Parts of a Plant

One of my goals for the break was to begin Blob Mapping with the girls! They have really enjoyed this. So far, we are just tracing a blob map from a Half a Hundred Acre template. My goal is to get at least Little Bug able to draw a Blob Map free-hand by the end of the school year. The Magic Tree House books coordinate well with the History Memory Work so we dug a little bit deeper about China and Japan as we read Day of the Dragon King and Night of the Ninjas. The girls made a Japanese flag! We enjoyed reading and learning more about these countries from some of our Usborne books!

The Jesse Tree

We read The Jesse Tree this year and used these ornaments from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I was overall pleased with The Jesse Tree, however, they do have the wise men coming to see Jesus at the manger which is not Biblically accurate. I am not sure if we will make reading The Jesse Tree a yearly tradition but it was fun to do this year with the girls. I read to them during the week during our morning Bible time and Dave read to the girls at night before bedtime on the weekends.

Christmas Fun

Most of our fun Christmas activities this year were spur of the moment things I came up with using supplies I already had on hand because I realized last-minute we didn’t have any fun Christmas activities scheduled. The girls loved it all!

One day, we made snow…from a diaper. We did this last year and Little Bug loved it (Sweet Pea wasn’t so sure about the texture). This year, both girls loved it. All you do is soak a diaper with water, cut it out and the inside is snow-like. I dump it all out on a cookie sheet, give the girls some toys to play in the snow with and they are good to play to their heart’s content. Last year, since it was cold, we did this at the kitchen table. This year, since it was warm outside, I laid a plastic down and let them play outside. Afterwards, we came back inside and they watched Frosty the Snowman.

We did have one planned fun activity. We Drew a Reindeer! Then later in the week the girls made a Gingerbread man and Handprint Christmas Tree!

Birthday Celebration

My Grandpa turned 90 years old right before Christmas. The entire family gathered together to celebrate his birthday. It was a whirlwind of a trip (right before Christmas!) but worth it to be there to celebrate his 90th birthday with all the family together. My Grandpa has 3 sons (one is my Dad), 6 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren! It was his first time meeting Sarge!

Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ! We had our traditional Christmas Eve at my parents’ house. We eat dinner together, sing Christmas Carols and then go look at lights before heading home to tuck everyone in bed for the night!

We kept to our three gifts per child tradition for Christmas (plus a few things in the stocking) for our children. I love a good deal on a Christmas present. Little Bug really, really wanted a Barbie Dream House. Last Christmas we bought them a Dollhouse for Christmas but it was not played with at all, much to my surprise. So, I sold the Dollhouse and used that money to buy a Barbie Dream House on Craigslist. I think we ended up paying $20 out of pocket for the Barbie Dream House! Sarge’s main gift was a recycled Race car track from the girls so that cost us $0! We spent the morning at home and then after Sarge’s morning nap, we headed back over to my parents’ house where both sides of the family gathered for a Christmas Day meal together. I love this tradition of both families getting together at the same location each year! It was a wonderful Christmas Day!

And now it is time to ring in a New Year!!

- Elaine