 Hey everybody, welcome to the Laudak Way, I'm Jessica. In today's video, in case you can't tell, is going to be our holiday homeschool plans. I look forward to this time of year all year round. This is literally my favorite. Homeschooling in December and being able to Christmas school and just make Christmas homeschool is such a gift that I just, I love it. So I'm very, very excited to share with you what we have planned for the month of December. If you are new here, welcome. And if you are not new here, some of this is probably gonna look familiar because some of Christmas school has very literally become a tradition for us. And it's things that we do every year that we can't imagine not doing in our homeschool anymore. It's just become kind of a family thing. So I'm just gonna start at the beginning. Our days are gonna begin with morning basket every morning. Our morning basket will include tons of read-alows and really fun, simple, relaxed activities for us to do together as a family. Don't worry, I'm gonna share our morning basket videos with you very soon, they will be up the end of this week. But until then, I will link some of our past morning baskets in the description box so that you can go ahead and get some inspiration of maybe what you would like to include in yours. Now after our morning time, we will come to the table together as a family and do some kind of lesson together. So our lessons for the month of December are going to vary a little bit. Most of the time, pretty much every day, Monday through Thursday, Emily is going to pick an activity from this box. Now I have been doing this for, I don't know, probably four years now and it's really become one of her favorite things. When she saw me pull this box out for this video, she literally ran up and hugged it because she looks forward to it so much. So I take just a simple box and I prep a handful of hands-on activities for centers like math and literacy centers that are themed for the month of December. And then once I cut them, I put them all in Manila envelopes. Now I told you last year, I'm gonna tell you again, these are not finished because I normally decorate the envelopes, you know, some cute Christmas washi tape or stickers. But she has no clue what is in the envelopes. They all are in here and they just all look the same. And so each day, she just will randomly pick one. Sometimes she digs to the bottom, sometimes she gets something from the top. And then she will do whichever center that is or whichever activity that is. So this is what this one is. It's a math one. These are nothing but math and literacy. So math and language arts type of activities. What I like to do when I prep these is I like to print off fourth and fifth grade typically or whatever grade she's in and then the grade she was in, I'll go through both of them and print various activities because I like for the month of December to be some review and some new. I don't want it to be all new concepts because I want her to have a break too. So I make sure that it's full of things that are a review for her as well as just a handful of concepts that might be new to her. That way she's getting some relaxed December just like the rest of us. And she's not learning a new concept every single day. So that is something she looks forward to all year round. She loves that. In addition to that, last year we started a Christmas shopping project and I actually made some free printables to go along with it. So I will link this down in the description box in case you wanna start it with your kids. And so this is gonna be another large portion of her math for this December. So what I do is I will give her a certain allotment of people like let's just for an example say five people and let's say I decide that she can spend $20 a person thereabouts. I'm gonna say, if you have five people to buy four here or their names, you have $100 to spend. So you can actually fill that out for your child here on this piece of paper. And then they get this Christmas gifts where they can put the name, some gift ideas, different stores. So they can price it at different stores. And then there's even a section for if they have coupons, what the tax is gonna be, what the shipping is gonna be. Because I really, really wanted Emily to have some real life experience with the fact that if something says 9.99, it's not just 9.99. And she's likes to buy gifts. Her leveling which is gift giving. So she loves to buy and give gifts. So this is a great, great way for her to get in some extra math in the month of December. So again, I haven't decided how many people she's buying for or what her allowance for buying budget will be. But I know that we will be doing that again this year. And then we always do a mail time Monday is what we call it. So I'm kind of mail time in our home school. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, I'll link a video up here where we do a mail time Monday and show you kind of how we do it. So I always get some kind of Christmas cards. When she was younger, I would get the paint with water ones. The past couple of years, I've gotten the ones that are black and white and you can either paint or color them. And so that's what we will do on Mondays is we will sit down together and color and write cards to people. I picked up some envelopes and some Christmas stickers. So we will just enjoy snail mail Mondays through the month of December and probably even Tuesdays too. Because typically when we're doing Christmas cards, her list is a lot longer that she wants to send to. So it kind of moves over into the next day, which is absolutely fine with me. And then she is going to be taking a book club with Mary Hannah Wilson. Last year's book club was a Christmas Carol and she was thrilled to see that this year's book club is a boy called Christmas. We absolutely love this book and the entire series. We've read them multiple times. And so Miss Mary is actually doing a book and movie book club with this in December. So they're going to be reading the book, then discussing the book and then watching the movie and discussing the movie. So it'll be a two-part book club for the month. And she's absolutely thrilled about that. And then in addition to the things I showed you for math and language arts, the bulk of our learning for the month of December has pretty much always been some kind of Christmas or holiday geography type of study. So a Christmas around the world, a holidays around the world, some type of something like that. So in 2020, we did our holiday fun around the world unit because 2020 needed all the extra fun that it could get. And thankfully I had created this and it was just such a blessing that year. And then last year we started Santa's tasty trip around the world, which is so much fun because it is whatever traditional cookie or dessert that Santa would be fed in all of the different countries. I will link videos to both of these in the description box. This year I'm actually going to be combining them somewhat. So holiday fun around the world is literally a year of holidays, but I'm going to be pulling the December holidays out. So that would be St. Nicholas's Day, St. Lucie's Day, Las Posadas, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, and Omasoka. So I'm going to be pulling those holidays out and we will be doing those with holiday fun around the world. Now when they happen to overlap in Santa's tasty treats, such as Las Posadas in Mexico and so on and so on, we will obviously be doing them together. But when there's not a holiday happening and holiday fun around the world, we will dive in and just let her pick a country out of Santa's tasty trip around the world and we will do whatever she picks because there's 32 different countries and sweet treats in here for Santa's tasty trip around the world. So we're going to be combining them just a little bit. And the reason we are doing that is because we are planning a rather large trip to Walt Disney World this year, specifically to go to Epcot because Epcot does an international festival of the holidays around this time of year. And so I really want her to be very familiar and it kind of be fresh in her brain, not just Christmas, but also other holidays that are celebrated. So we're going to mix the two. And that way when we go and we're in all of the different countries because we'll be in Mexico and the United Kingdom and France and Norway, she'll have an idea even before we go of how all of these are celebrated. Epcot does a storyteller for each of the different holidays in the different countries. They also have treats and food. So we're really, really excited to incorporate that into our holiday. Emily's favorite is the cookie stroll where she gets to go around and try the different cookies from some of the different locations. But this way we're really getting to kind of do not just Christmas, but also holidays and we're going to combine them. But that's not to say that neither of them is not a complete because they definitely are. Like I said, Santa's tasty trip around the world is 32 different countries and different treats. So plenty to do there. And then holiday fun around the world includes 36, I believe, different holidays. And it's technically an entire year worth of holidays. So both of them are definitely full on their own. I'm just going to be unique and combine them for kind of a really, really big bang this year. Now, if you're watching this video when it goes live, I will say if you want to do either of these in your homeschool with your family, make sure you subscribe, which I will leave a link in the description box so that you are alerted because we are going to be having a Black Friday sale, which is our biggest sale of the year. So you'll be able to pick either or both of those up for basically a rock bottom price. Okay, in addition to those and our trip to Epcot, we also like to add in Universal Yums, which is one of our absolute favorite subscriptions in our homeschool anyway. But in the month of December, they always do a holiday around the world type of thing. Instead of one country, I believe this specific box this year is seven different countries. And so we tend to upgrade to the super, super yum box so that we're getting all the yums from all the places. So this is the biggest box that they offer. We typically only do the medium box. That's all we've ever found that we need, especially when it's just one country, but when they do seven and we really like to focus specifically on the holiday around the world, we upgrade to the big one. So we will be enjoying that as a family, kind of in the evenings together. Well, we won't sit down and do the whole box at once because that is a lot of snacks. We'll do one to two snacks an evening and just kind of read about what they are and where they're from and just enjoy that together. So that is pretty much like the bulk of our homeschool. That's what Monday through Friday is gonna look like. Monday through Thursday is gonna look like, sorry. On a Friday we have a family fun day. And our family fun day is books and movies. We read a book and we watch a movie. A lot of times we'll have cookies because we'll be baking tons of cookies and we'll drink hot chocolate or whatever we're having. And we just enjoy that time together as a family. And so the books that we have done for I believe the past three years that have kind of become a staple tradition are How the Grinch Stole Christmas. So we will read this and then either watch multiple versions of it or we'll let Emily pick which version she wants to watch. And then we will read Elf and watch that movie. We will read A Christmas Carol and then Emily will typically pick which one she wants to watch. We try to change it up every few years. And then we read Home Alone and Home Alone 2. And on this night we do a double feature. Obviously we watch both movies. And then we try to save this one for last so it's as close to Christmas Eve as possible. And we read and watch the Polar Express. Last year it actually fell on Christmas Eve which is kind of perfect. I'm pretty sure this year it will be the night before Christmas Eve. So like I said, we just read the book and watch the movie. And occasionally you'll see, because I'm gonna show you the Christmas games that we have, occasionally we'll play a game to go with it because some of these books we do actually have games that kind of match them. So that is what we do on Fridays and then pretty much the entire month of December and the evening on the weekends when we just have a little bit of free time when we finished early, whatever the case may be, you can find us playing games. Typically Christmas games because these games only come out for a month and then they get packed back up and so we play them nonstop for the entire month of December. So the Christmas games that we have, we have collected over the years, we started I think with maybe two or three and we add two or three, sometimes four or five, every holiday season to our collection. So when I show you what I'm gonna show you, we haven't always had this many Christmas games. You don't need this many Christmas games or maybe you do. I'll let you decide that. Okay, we're just gonna go ahead and show them now. The first one we have is Holiday Spot It. I believe we found this at Target in the Dollar Spot at one point because it's actually smaller than the typical Spot It, which here's a Rudolph Spot It. You can see the size difference there. We have a holiday version of Yahtzee, mainly because Kevin wasn't gonna go an entire month without playing Yahtzee. So we found a holiday version once and we bought it. It comes in a cute little gift box and the dice have kind of cute little Christmas symbols on them, but the game itself plays exactly the same. We have Absolute Dice Christmas. It's just a really fun dice game. Lumps, which is a lump of coal game. We have Lama Drama Holiday Edition. We have Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman, which is the holiday version of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. We have Holiday Flux. Now this isn't just Christmas. This is all of the holidays year round. Like, I know Halloween, New Year, there's other ones too. So this goes really well with holiday fun around the world if you're doing multiple holidays. Christmas Rush, which is basically a version of Spoon. So it comes with little gift present things instead of you having to use a Spoon, but it plays just like the Game Spoon. So if you like that game, you would like Christmas Rush. 12 Days, Something Wild, Chip and Dale's Christmas Treasures, Christmas Lights, Dash Away All, The Princess Present Party Game. Sorry, I'll drop that one. Grinch, Grow Your Heart, Frosty the Snowman, Elf, Snowball Snowdown, and then we have Dr. Seuss' Mary Grinchmas, Elf Journey from the North Pole, and the Elf game, North Pole to Manhattan. I will say I feel like this game board is a little easier to play than this one is if you have younger kids. They both say eight plus. Let me see if you can see that. But if you have younger kids, like let's say five or six, and you were looking at these two, I would say I think this one is a little bit easier. The board itself isn't quite as confusing. My personal favorite, Santa's Sleigh Ride. You actually help Santa deliver the gifts and the board is actually the world map. It's kind of the perfect game for our holiday around the world. I absolutely love it. Present, a pile up board game. Emily will not let me get rid of this because she loves that it comes with a little catapult and you catapult your presents into the sleigh. She's actually quite good at it, which I think is why she won't let me get rid of it. And the last one is Christmas Oply, which is basically a monopoly with a Christmas twist. So those are all of our Christmas games. Now, like I said, on Fridays when we have a book and movie, obviously if we are going to be doing the Grinch, we are probably also going to pick one of these to play. And then the same thing if we're going to be doing Elf, well, we have three to pick from, but we are probably going to pick one of these to play as well. And then normally when we do Home Alone, that's a double feature, so we're not gonna play a game. Sometimes depending on what else we're doing Christmas Eve, we'll play one of our ticket to rides when we do Polar Express and then Christmas Carol. Normally that is a night where we watch multiple versions, typically, so we don't always have time for a game. So that is the majority of our homeschool holiday plans. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope it was helpful. I would absolutely love it if you told me what you are planning for the holidays in your homeschool. Let me know down in the comments, are you just taking that off? Do you have something fun Christmas school-like planned or are you just continuing with your regular planned scheduled homeschool stuff? I would absolutely love to know. Please let me know down in the comments.