3 Insanely Easy Ways to Have Fun With Christmas School | Holiday Homeschooling

Something we’ve done for years now is Christmas schooling. During the holidays, we jam pack fun things into our schedule, even more than normal, so for the month of December we get very creative with our school time and we do much less traditional schooling during that month. I break this into 3 super easy steps to keep our holiday school schedule fun and full of learning without being stressful. 

First, if you’re new here welcome! I’m Tonya Johnson and I’m the founder of helping hearts ministries where we work with homeschool parents to put the fun back into homeschooling while focusing on keeping a biblical worldview.

I start planning this mid-October because I do not like to feel overwhelmed or like I’m behind. I’d rather plan out our holiday schedule mid October and then spend November and December just having a ton of fun!

Before we get started, pull out the calendar

Go to your town’s Facebook page or just google “holiday events in (name of town), and familiarize yourself with all that your area has to offer. You’d be surprised how many free options are available during the holiday season as well. Choose the things you want to go to and add them to your calendar. This is the time where I also add church and family events that are scheduled as well. Basically, I get a feel for what we have on the calendar for November and December before we plan the school components of the season. Remember that there’s not a number of things you have to do. If you don’t like being busy, don’t schedule things for every weekend. If you’re in a season where you’re ready to get out of the house and do all of the things, go for it! Do what you feel is best for your family, not what someone on Instagram says they’re doing for their family.

This is something we’ve been doing since Glori was old enough to unwrap presents, so basically when she was about a year old. Every year we do something different, but basically for the 12 days (or 25 days if you choose) leading up to Christmas you get to open one gift. These gifts are always themed. A few of the concepts we’ve used for this were board books, craft sets (some more expensive, but many were from the dollar store), games, hair accessories, craft supplies, etc. I put together a blog post that goes over a ton of themes, ways to make these educational days, and ways to do this for under $5 for all 25 days!! Click here to check out everything you need to know to do your own "12 days of Christmas Homeschool".

This year we’re doing the 12 days of Christmas movies! Next week, I’m going to drop a video that explains what we’re doing for each movie and how we’re making each movie into a special day, so you can come back next week if you’d like more info for that. As you can see on the calendar, I just put #1-#12 on the days in December that we don’t have any other activities planned and those will be the days she opens a movie box. Now, she doesn’t know we’re doing this, so if you know us in real life, please don’t mention this to her.

So full disclosure, I actually do this for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Each month I grab 20-25 manila envelopes; this cost me $3 from the dollar store. I put a math and literacy center in each one. If you're not familiar with centers, they're basically a fun sheet that is themed for the holiday and helps practice certain math or language arts skills. If you’re enrolled in our homeschool made fun academy, you get a pack delivered to your inbox each month of ready to go centers that are perfect for this. For October we had things like invisible spelling words, a “light the pumpkin” race to practice our oi, ow, and ou words, and a writing/drawing activity where Glori and a friend got to design halloween costumes for their moms. For November we will be creating recipe cards for how to cook a turkey, doing a ton of projects to go along with the book “how to catch a turkey”, writing gratitude notes to several people on fun, themed apple spice cup templates, and then planning our own Thanksgiving Day Parade. Then for Christmas we’ve got several fun centers planned including creating a holiday gift giving guide, building word snowmen, helping Santa solve some critical thinking problems and even planning a vacation for him for after the holidays. So we do a ton of fun school for the holidays. What I do is prep each center out and put each one in a Manila envelope and then put stickers on the outside. They all go into a bin and she gets to pick one each day to open and complete. These centers are part of the "Homeschool made fun academy". You can click the button below to grab your first month for free.

In addition, we do use some additional centers as fillers between the more hands on holiday centers included inside the academy. 

So that’s what we’re doing for the holidays. I don’t want to take a break completely from learning, but I know we won’t keep to a rigid school schedule either, so this is how we continue learning while making it extra fun. Watch the corresponding video to get a glimpse of how this works in real time as well as to see some of the fun centers we've completed so far.  I appreciate you taking the time to tune in today, and I'd love to hear if you do Christmas school in your homeschool and if you do, what are some of the things you do? Scroll down to the bottom and let us know in a comment. 

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