 Hey, everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be Christmas school. That's right, it's that time of the year. It is time to talk about all things Christmas. In fact, you're gonna be seeing a lot of Christmas on my channel over the next month because I'm so excited, and it is the first thing that has brought me joy in months, so I'm going to be sharing with you guys everything that we have planned for Christmas school this season, and please keep in mind that just because we have it planned doesn't necessarily mean that it's gonna happen. We all know, you know, plans are what they are. So I'm gonna show you what we have planned, the things that I'm hoping that we get to, the things I'm hoping that we get done, but if you really wanna see more of what we're really doing, you should follow me on Instagram or Facebook, and those links are in the description box down below because that's where I kinda share a more realistic view of what's happening in our homeschool. But I will also be doing a Christmas school day in the life later in December, so you will get to kinda see all of this put into action. So stay tuned for that as well. All right, let's get right into it. So first and foremost, every day will be started with morning basket, which you just saw Emily share our morning basket the other day, and if you missed it, you can check it out right here. And the one thing that I have tried really hard to hold true for our morning basket, at least in the last year, is that our morning basket does not really include any writing or any crafting or anything that I need extra pieces and parts for. And that is because I really like our morning basket to be said it and forget it. So we said it once a month, everything is in there. I don't need to go hunting for extra pieces or parts for a craft or an activity. Normally we don't even need pencils. It's books and games and the kind of crafts that we have are like color or puzzles or Lego. Everything's contained within it. We don't need any extras. And I like that because our morning basket is normally done with me a half asleep before being honest. So this book is going to be part of our Christmas school, but it is not in our morning basket because there are crafts included. So my plan is for us to start our day with morning basket and then when we move to the table, I will read a chapter out of this and this is how Winston delivered Christmas and it is about this little mouse Winston, how he finds a letter to Santa and he delivers it. And what is amazing about this is first of all, it's in color, so it has beautiful illustrations and it has 24 chapters. So there is basically a chapter for every day in December and at the end of every single chapter is some sort of activity. So for chapter one, you would write a letter to Santa Claus after you've read it. And then for instance, for chapter two, you make a Winston puppet, so you make a little mouse puppet. So while this would work well in morning basket, if you do the craft type of stuff in your morning basket, I don't want to have to do that. Like I want to be able to do morning basket with no stress and then move on to, okay, let me go find the stuff for this or whatever it is. I don't want to have to stress about it. I want the Christmas season to be as zero stress as possible. So this will be done after our morning basket every morning. And then after that, Emily normally gets to pick a center to do. And what I did this year is I got all of my centers from one shop and I will link her in the description box down below. In fact, everything will be linked down there. But it's Farah Henley. She's one of the few people that I have found that still does math and literacy centers for older kiddos. So it's very common to find things for preschool to second grade. Once you start getting the third and fourth, it's not as easy and she has third and fourth grade. So what I did is I printed a lot of different centers. I have some of the Moffat Girls note prep pages and then I have some of Farah centers. And what I do is put them all in a Christmas box. And then this Christmas box is under our tree. So we will do morning basket. We'll do our Advent chapter from how Winston delivered Christmas. And then she gets to go under the tree, open the box and pick any center she wants to do. She's only, and I say required, I say required very loosely. She only has to do one a day. She can pick anyone she wants. I normally prep about 30 because in the beginning of the month, she's really excited and she'll do more than one a day. But then that kind of tapers off as the month goes on. But I have found that prepping about 30 centers or activities is perfect for us anymore and we don't get to them any less. And there's normally some days I'm trying to find something extra for her to do. So that is kind of the groundwork of our Christmas school for December. That's like our basics, if you will. We will obviously also be working through holiday fun around the world. And if you would like to see more information about this, you can do that right here. But our plan with this is to actually do the curriculum as the holidays are happening in the real world in the calendar. So we will try to observe the holiday as it's happening for whatever length it's happening. Like so obviously Hanukkah would be eight days and things like that kind of observe it as much as possible so that we can be learning more about the actual cultures and the traditions and be observing it as we're learning about it. So holiday fun around the world is something that we will do more than just December. We will be doing it from December, January and even into February because Chinese New Year is in February as well as I believe even April and May when Ramadan happens. So it is not necessarily just happening in December but the majority of the holidays included in this right now do happen in December. So it is a big part of our Christmas schooling. In addition to all of that, you guys probably saw the Christmas stories of Charles Dickens and who was Charles Dickens included in our morning basket. So we will be reading these during morning basket but we will also be doing the who was Charles Dickens mini unit study along with the who was book and when we are done reading the Christmas Carol we will be celebrating it with celebrate a book, a Christmas Carol by Celebrate a Book and we will also be watching the movie. So that's kind of gonna be like the end of that study. We'll be doing a Charles Dickens Christmas study for the whole month and celebrating with celebrating you know celebrating a book and watching the movie and I guess kind of like a party after reading it. It just, it sounds amazing. I will make sure I leave links to that in the description box down below as well. We also have two subscriptions that we are super excited to be including in our Christmas school. One is the Kiwi Co. We've fallen in love with their boxes recently and they had a holiday pack. I only have one of them in so far the other two are on their way. This is the Santa's Light Up workshop. There is also a Santa sleigh automation and a ice rink that came in the holiday pack as well. So that is something that we will be doing. The other subscription box that is literally our favorite thing about the holidays is Universal Yums. Now this is technically November's box that you're looking at. December is the only month that we upgrade to what they call the Super Super Yum box. It's the biggest box and it's because the December box includes snacks from 10 different countries around the world and so we love incorporating that into kind of like a holidays around the world thing and just getting to try snacks from all over and I want to try all the snacks from all of the places during that month. So we upgrade to the biggest box just for December and then come January we will downgrade our subscription back to a smaller box. Not that that, I mean all the boxes are great but I just really like having all of the snacks in December so the holiday box is hands down something we look forward to every year. I think this will be our third or fourth year doing the Holiday Universal Yums box and it never disappoints. And because it is very important to Kevin and I that we are being very intentional with our family time and connecting together during Christmas we set aside Fridays for just kind of like a family fun day. So we will spend Friday day playing games and just hanging out together and then Friday evening we will be having a Christmas movie night. Now that doesn't mean that we're not gonna be watching Christmas movies all day and night the entire month of December because we will but we are just setting these specific times aside to watch the movie and I made sure that I picked movies that we also have books to go with so we will spend time reading the book, watching the movie and having some sort of special snack or some sort of special something to do at that point. So I have Elf, Home Alone 1 and 2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And last but most definitely not least the Polar Express. Now when we watch the Polar Express we normally also do my Polar Express movie night pack along with that we kind of make like a whole Polar Express day. We play Ticket to Ride and we do the Polar Express pack and we make the snack and the hot chocolate. We read the book and we watch the movie and ends up being like a whole family day. And because that is such a huge part of our family tradition, we want to pass that on to as many families as possible. So all you have to do is like, comment and be a subscriber and five people will be eligible to win one of our Polar Express movie night packs. All right, so the last thing I'm gonna show you guys are the holiday games that we have. Now some of these are gonna be repeats from what you saw the other day in our morning basket but there are also some that Emily doesn't know exist yet like they'll be mysteriously arriving this month for Christmas schooling. So I'm gonna show you guys all of them. I'm sorry for the repeats but just in case you wanna add them to your Christmas going I wanted to make sure we showed you early enough that you could order them. Spot it, holiday. Llama Drama Holiday Edition. Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman. Holiday Flux. Christmas Lights. 12 Days. Christmas Rush. Absolute Dice Christmas. Yahtzee Holiday Edition. You guys, we're not even gonna talk about how long I searched for this or how much I paid for this but you know that Yahtzee is like the top played game in our homeschool and our house and our family and our game times whatever you wanna call it. So when I did actually realize that this existed it was a must have. Dash Away All. Lumps the Elf Cole Game. Santa's Slay Ride. Present. Pile Up. And that's it. That's everything that we have that we're going to be attempting to do during our Christmas school. And our Christmas school actually will start like the day after Thanksgiving and we'll go all the way through. I believe I decided we're not going back to regular school until January 11th because I wanna make sure that we observe all the way through Epiphany, Three Kings Day and then even after that. So I think it's actually about six weeks is what we have for Christmas school just in case you are looking at this thinking of me and that feels like a lot. We're actually going to be kinda taking it easy and Christmas schooling it for approximately six weeks. So what about you? Will you just be breaking over the holiday season or will you be Christmas schooling as well?