 Hey everybody, welcome to The Wallach Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell series is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rooted and Rest and myself. Our goal with this series was really just to show that there's not one right way to homeschool. So we bring homeschoolers together from around the world every month and we all post about the same topic. That way you can see you can homeschool successfully in many different ways. This month's topic, in case you haven't guessed it, is our holiday homeschool plans. And I am super excited because this is my favorite time of the year, like I live all year long for this. In fact, my entire house is already decorated and it is early November. Like I said, I live for it. It is my favorite time of the year. So I go all out on holiday homeschool plans. However, even by going all out, we still try to keep it kind of low-key because our whole kind of attitude around homeschooling shifts. It's a little bit cozier, a little bit more laid back. We just kind of want to be home together. It just, that's really what we're trying to foster this time of year is togetherness and coziness and just, you know, connection, which we're trying to do all year long. We just do it a little bit differently this time of year. And I cannot wait to see what everybody else does this time of year too. So if you want to check out a ton of people's holiday homeschool plans, make sure you click the link in the description box so that you can watch the playlist of all of the videos where all of the homeschool holiday plans are being made. Okay, I'm not going to make you guys wait any longer. We are going to jump right in because I am busting at the seams. The plans that we have for this holiday season are not super different than what they are every year. We kind of have found our rhythm and we just kind of stick with it. We change things up a little bit. We do pretty much the same things every year. So we will obviously do a Christmas-themed morning basket. You can see last year's morning basket here. I will be sharing this year's morning basket soon. So if you're interested in seeing that, make sure you are subscribed and click that bell so that your notifications are turned on. And then we will be doing centers again, like we have done in the past. So for math and literacy, what I do is I get like a Christmas box. This is the box that I'm using this year. It's super cute because it says open every December. So I thought that was very fitting. And I prep math and literacy centers. This year I am using Farrah-Hinley's literacy centers. I'm using specifically December's because they're Christmas-themed, which makes them really fun. And they cover a ton of different literacy and math topics. So if you were to only prep her December fourth grade ones, like I did, you would have 20 centers. So that's about one a day for the entire month of December. Now what I did is I went back into third grade and I also went forward into fifth grade. And I prepped about 30 centers. So 15 literacy and 15 math. That way we were reviewing a few things. I felt like she still needed review on all of fourth grade and then a few things that I thought she was ready for in fifth grade. And I can do that because I actually own all of the literacy centers from Farrah-Hinley because we love them so much. So what I do is, like I said, I put them all in this box. And this year, because I wanted them to be even more of a surprise for Emily, I put each of the centers in a manila envelope. Now I haven't finished yet. My plan is to decorate these with washi tape and stickers and stamps. I make them really, really Christmassy and cute. But that way each day, when she gets ready to do a center, she has no clue what they are. So I used to prep them in either Ziploc bags or clear bags so she could pick and choose. And she can still pick and choose. But I just really wanted her to have that feel of it being like a present she got to open. So this way when she goes through here, there will be all of these different manila envelopes and she will just randomly pick one and open it and that's what she'll do that day for math and or literacy, which is language arts. That is probably one of our absolute favorite things. She loves doing that because it feels like I said, like a gift every day, like something new, something surprising. Now we will continue to do our mail time Mondays. The only difference will be that they will obviously turn into more of a Christmas card session. We'll be making, creating, addressing and sending Christmas cards to people. So a few of the things that I got to go along with that are these coloring Christmas cards. These are super cute because you can color them any way you wish and they are gorgeous. And they come with red and green envelopes and there's all kinds of different illustrations for you to color. I also have blank, completely blank cards that she can draw something of her own. And then not here yet, but I've already ordered them are the magic painting cards from Usborne so that you can just paint with water and she could paint a picture for a Christmas card. So those are the different types of cards that we'll be making during our mail time Monday. And then I also picked up because I couldn't resist three books that are kind of like about letters at Christmas time that just seem like they would be the perfect addition to our mail time Mondays during this holiday season. So I have the Jolly Christmas Postman and this book has actual letters in it which is one of the things I really liked. Letters and Christmas cards, the crayons Christmas which again has those adorable little Christmas letters and Christmas cards in them. And then Santa Post, which also has little with the flap type letters within it. Now, if you know of any other books that are like that that have Christmas letters or cards within the book, please let me know because I would love to add them to our mail time Mondays, but those are the three that I have. I just thought it would be really fun to have these surprises while we were doing mail time Mondays. So we'll kind of start with a book and then we'll make our own Christmas cards and then something we'll do every single Monday. Something else Emily is doing for Literacy or Language Arts through the holiday months is a Christmas Carol book club. Now, this is the selection that I have made for her to read from, mainly because one of the things I love about the Usborne Complete Works is that it kind of has like a character guide at the front of the story. So it makes it easy for her to visualize the characters. Now, I read the Christmas Carol last year to her. This year she will read this herself and do her book club with Mary Hannah Wilson, which I will link in the description box because she has a couple different book clubs. One that's even the graphic novel of a Christmas Carol which I think would be really fun as well, especially this holiday season if you wanna get a little bit of extra language arts in there and her book clubs are just so much fun. She always does a game and some sort of activity and the kids love them. It's Emily's favorite thing. She looks forward to them every month. So she's really excited that she gets to do one in December because the regular one ended in November and then the next season or semester didn't start till January. So when she released the Christmas Carol one, Emily was like, we're doing it right. Of course we are. Okay, so that is kind of like our morning basket and then our math and language arts pretty much for the entire holiday season. In addition to that, we will be doing an around the world unit study. We've always done some kind of around the world or Christmas around the world holiday fun around the world is what we did last year, which we had a blast doing. We celebrated all kinds of different holidays. We did Diwali, we did Hanukkah, we did St. Lucia's Day, we did Lunar New Year with so many. We had so much fun. It was a blast. And we talked about doing that again this year. However, we decided to do something different. So our favorite Christmas picture book, hands down favorite Christmas picture book is A World of Cookies for Santa. This is the book that is picked the most off of ourselves every single holiday season. Because of that, I decided to turn this or maybe not turn this into, but we're at a unit study inspired by this book for us to use this holiday season. And that unit study will be released to the public if you're interested in joining us on our tasty trip, Black Friday, because it will be part of our Black Friday blowout. It will be our biggest sale of the year and this will be released and included in that sale. So you can get it at a rock bottom price. So make sure that you're subscribed to my email list for the first news about it. I will leave that in the description box as well. But the plan is to do what we are calling Santa's tasty trip around the world. Like I said, based off of or inspired by A World of Cookies for Santa, where we will learn about the 30 plus places that he visits and bake all 30 recipes that he eats in this book. So we will map it, we will bake, we will have a fun time learning and just being in the kitchen and just enjoying each other. And we will also be extending it a little bit with traveling the world. So anytime there is overlap, which there are quite a few that will overlap in Santa's tasty treats, we will extend it even further by doing the unit or the section that coordinates with traveling the world. So that is the basis for our Christmas around the world study this particular season. You can see the things we've done in the years past. On my blog, which I will link in the description box if you wanna see some of the things we've done for Christmas going in years past. The last thing that we will add to that kind of study is our Universal Yums. We absolutely love this subscription. Now this obviously is not the holiday box. The holiday box is normally red, but we do upgrade every December to the large. So we typically get the small or medium box for our subscription, but for December and December only, we change our subscription to the large box because it is from multiple places, not just one. And we like having the snacks and learning more about the holiday season around the world. So we will do that again this year. We'll upgrade to the large box and we'll enjoy that for the month of December along with tasting all of the treats that Santa is gonna eat from Christmas around the world. And now that is like our homeschool. That's kind of the basis for our homeschool. But during the holiday season, we always do fun Fridays. It's just kind of unintentionally been something we did in the past and then we've started making it very intentional now. And during fun Fridays, we spend the day playing games together. And then in that evening, we do a movie night. And in the past few years, our movie night has kind of transformed into a book and movie night because we found that we have some favorite Christmas movies that happen to have beautiful picture books that go with them. And so that's what we do. We play games all day, we eat dinner and then we come back together and we read a Christmas story and then we watch the coordinating movie. I'm gonna show you the books that I have chosen to do this year. There are five of them because we start the Friday after Thanksgiving. So Black Friday, we have the Grinch who stole Christmas. So again, we'll read this and then watch the movie. The picture book of a Christmas Carol. Now, even though Emily is still reading that on her own, we will still do this as a family because it's a tradition. We don't wanna break. Elf, which is amazing. And of course we will eat all of the sugary chocolatey, sweetie candy when we watch that. These two we do simultaneously. So we do Home Alone 1 and Home Alone 2 and then watch both movies that night. So we always save this for a Friday when the weather is nasty or we're definitely not going anywhere. We're just kind of feeling blah because it's like a double feature. And then the last one, we always save it as our very last one. And if it doesn't fall on a Friday, which this year it does, we do it Christmas Eve and that is Polar Express. So those are the five books that we will be reading Fridays and then watching the movies. And because I know you guys are gonna ask me because of course you're gonna wanna know what games we will be playing. I'm gonna show you what Christmas games we have that we love that we play pretty much all season long. The first one is Holiday Spot It. Now we actually got this from Target. So if you cannot find it online, which I don't think you can currently, make sure you're checking Target because that's where I found that originally. Lumps, which is adorable. We have the original lumps and this is the Christmas lumps. It's really not that much different than the original. It's just black dice that look like coal and they're stored in a stocking and we just thought it was cute and we love the original game. So that's fantastic. Absolute Dice Christmas. Holiday Flux. 12 days of Christmas. The Christmas Light Card Game. Dash Away All. Santa Cookie, let's see what is it? Santa Cookie Elf Candy Snowman, which is essentially Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza Christmas Edition. You guys, if you watched my Halloween or Holiday Hall lately, you know I bought the Halloween Edition. We love this game. It gets played a ton at our house. So of course that one is probably one of our top-played Christmas games. Christmas Rush. Llama Drama, the Holiday Edition, which Christmas llamas are adorable. Yahtzee Holiday, again, is not that different. It's still dice that have number on them. The dice just kind of have a holiday look to them. The score pad is red instead of black. And it comes in a cute holiday box. But Yahtzee is one of those games, much like Spot It, and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza that was gonna get played constantly in our house no matter what. So when I found the Holiday Edition, I knew I had to have it. But obviously they're not necessities or necessary, the originals work just fine. They're just games we play a ton. And if we can get a holiday spin to it, we're going to. Elf, the Journey from the North Pole. I don't know if this is available everywhere. Last year, you could only get it at Target. But if I can find it on Amazon, I will link it for you guys. Santa's Slay Ride, which is spreading joy around the world. And last, we have the Present Pile Up Board Game. So that is all of our holiday games currently. We are adding one more holiday game, which I will show you in our tradition video because it's one that Emily is getting in a specific tradition that we do. But it is another version of Spot It. So we will have another Holiday Spot It, which again is one of our top-played games, so you can't have enough of those. And what I will probably do is put it, or put one of these in my purse for the holiday season, since we'll have two. So that's it. That is really kind of all we're gonna be doing for the holiday season. Obviously, we still have some family traditions that we will do together, but our goal is to just enjoy each other and have fun. Now, if you're kind of wondering like, oh my gosh, Jessica, what is this actually going to look like in practice? Our day will flow similar to what it flows now. We will start with our morning basket. We'll sit down together as a family and do that. Then we will move to the table or to wherever Emily wants to move, and she will get to open the box and pick one center out. So she'll do one a day. And then from there, if it's a Monday, we will obviously do a Mail Time Monday. If it's not a Monday, then we'll go ahead and get started on our unit study. Somewhere in there she'll have lunch. I have a feeling our unit study will be after lunch in the afternoon, which means that we would probably learn about a new place and bake the cookie that afternoon. And then on Fridays, instead of doing our unit study or even our center, we'll do morning basket. Then we'll play games all day and then do the book and movie that evening. So that's kind of what it looks like if you want to actually see it in action. Again, make sure you're subscribed and turn on the bell notification icon because I will be doing a holiday day in the life for you guys so that you can see what it looks like in action. I hope you enjoyed hearing what we have planned for the holidays in our homeschool. Don't forget to check out that playlist where you can see even more homeschool holiday plans. And I would love to hear your homeschool holiday plans. So let me know in the comments, what are you planning for the holiday season in your school? Do you just take it off and do nothing? Do you have family traditions? Do you do? Do you have homeschool traditions? Let me know because I am always looking for new ideas to add to our homeschool.