 Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach Way. I'm Jessica. Today's video is going to be our holiday homeschool plans. Since Emily was in preschool, we have always done what I affectionately have referred to as Christmas schooling. Our personal lives are ridiculously busy from Thanksgiving to New Year's, and the last thing I wanted was to add more stress to that by trying to carry on with our homeschool. Now to mention homeschooling, at least for us, regular homeschooling with all of the hoopla of the holidays is really, really difficult. So we've kind of always done some form of Christmas going. It's looked a little bit different every year, but also some things have looked a lot similar. This year we have a lot going on in our external life even more than normal. Emily has some archery tournaments coming up. We have some pre-committed family events, and so I really decided that I wanted our Christmas schooling to be kind of simple, but also very meaningful. And so I took the traditions or the things that mean the most to us, the ones that have us cozying up and enjoying our time together. And that's kind of the focus for this year. And so for us, that means books, games, and movies. Like, those are embedded into our family traditions, and I didn't wanna lose those. And so that is a lot of what our Christmas school is going to look like. And because I said I wanted it a little bit simpler, that means we've dialed back a little this year. So I'm also going to be showing you our Christmas morning time in this video as well. Normally, that's its whole own video, but it is scaled back and very simple and meaningful this year. So I'm just gonna do everything together. So for our morning time each day, we will be reading from Unwrapping the Greatest Gift. This is a devotional. We absolutely love this. When Emily was younger, we had the one that had the pop-up tree with the ornaments, and we really, really enjoy that one as well. But this one is kind of a little bit more in-depth. It's still just as beautiful, just as meaningful. It's just a little more detailed in its writing. So this is the one we'll be using this year for our family advent. And then we are adding another advent, which is an Advent Carols Countdown. So this one includes a Christmas Carol Countdown. So each day there is a Christmas Carol. There's lyrics for that Christmas Carol. There's a QR code to scan to listen to it. And then there is some kind of story behind it. So either a story behind it or maybe even the history behind it, but it tells you more about that Carol. So I thought this would be a fun way to bring some Christmas Carols into our morning time, but still be five or 10 minutes or less. We've also already been enjoying the Halle Hades Minute Mysteries here lately. There's like 15 in each book, but this one happens to be the Christmas edition. I like to read these aloud to Emily because then she really, really has to be paying attention with her listening skills and well, there's no better way to say it. If you're raising a tween or a teen, you know listening skills are something they really need to work on. So I read these aloud and then Emily tries to solve them. They are super quick and very simple. And sometimes it's just like one little word you have to listen for. So I really, really enjoy these. I'm excited to do them this Christmas season. And then of course we have our Christmas Mad Libs. This is Christmas Chair Mad Libs. Emily would never let us have Christmas time, Christmas morning time without them. They're her absolute favorite. So that's kind of gonna be the things that we're doing every day. And then for read aloud, the things we will be reading aloud during our morning time will include a Christmas Carol. This happens to be the illustrated version. We have three or four different versions of this. I'm gonna let Emily pick. This is the one I'm leaning towards though. And the reason we are reading this one aloud is because we're actually gonna be doing a unit study with it. So the unit study we will be doing with it is a Christmas Carol novel unit study. This is a brand new release here at the Waldog Way. This will be the majority of her language arts for the Christmas school because it includes vocabulary, comprehension, writing, figurative language. We'll also tie in a lot of other things cross-curricular. We'll be doing some Christmas Carol math. We'll be doing history and geography and learning more about the Victorian era. We're actually going to be baking some recipes based off of the Christmas Carol and doing some crafts. We're hoping to have a Christmas Carol feast at the end of December. So this is going to be kind of the majority of what we're doing in December because we just think it's gonna be really, really fun. And then the other thing we will be reading aloud is Juniper's Christmas. Now this is by the same author as Artemis Fowle, which is why we're reading aloud versus Emily reading it independently because I loved that series. This is actually her Christmas book club book. So she takes book club classes with Mary Hannah Wilson all year long and Mary does a specific December class so that if you don't want to commit to a whole year you can just do a Christmas book club with her. And this is the one she's doing this year. Now she's doing it for eight to 10 year olds as well as 11 to 13. During the school year, Emily takes both of those book club classes but since December's book is the same for all ages, she'll just be taking the 11 to 13 year old class with her since that is actually the age group that she falls into. Last time I talked to Mary there were still a few openings. So I will make sure I link all of the stuff I'm mentioning in the description. If you think your kids would be interested they should definitely sign up. They can read it, they can listen to it. However, they prefer books but we love her book clubs. And so Emily will be doing that. We'll be reading it all out together but then she'll take the book club with Mary. For just a couple of things for hands on while we're doing it in the morning time I keep puzzles under our coffee table so it is now stocked with Christmas puzzles from years past. But then also we have the us born Christmas doodles just to give her something to doodle if she just needs to keep her hands busy. We also have the little sticker dolly dressing Christmas. This is actually leftover from last year she only did one or two of them so we've pulled them back out. And then the last thing I have we've done these for three years now and I keep having to order them again because she does them all but we got different ones this year. So these are just like color your own Christmas cards so she colors or paints and then we send them out as Christmas cards. So they just come, you fold them and they come with envelopes and everything so there's red and green envelopes in here and most of these are like hand drawn original artworks come and keep saying he's gonna make some one day but for now we just pre-purchased them and she colors or paints them and then we send them out as our family Christmas cards for the year. Okay the last thing that we might be doing this is at Emily's request and I'm saying might because our Christmas season is already very full so I'm not trying to cram it full even more but Emily asked if we could return to holiday fun around the world for a few of the holidays. We did this 2020 and 2021 as the bulk of our school year because well that was the year we all stayed home and let's be honest we needed a little more fun in our life so there are 30 holidays included in this for the entire year. She specifically has asked to focus on some of the winter holidays that she really enjoyed when we did them a few years ago such as St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucie's Day, Las Posadas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Epiphany and Lunar New Year. Those are the ones that she would like to revisit. I'm hoping that we can revisit them because thankfully holiday fun around the world makes it super simple. Basically I can just pull this and everything's ready to go for me and we already have all of the books on hand because we've done them before. We can bake the recipes. It's not like super in depth and I love that it's memories that we can make again that she can carry on with her. I just don't know how many we're gonna get to so this is a might and we still will probably only do between four and six of them depending on what our schedule looks like. So keep that in mind. Even somebody who writes the curriculum doesn't use it in its entirety always and that's absolutely okay. Also, we have a tradition and we have kept it going and we are going to keep it going that on either Friday or Saturday nights leading up to Christmas, we do a book and a movie. We've done it for as long as I can remember. And so we will be doing how the Grinch stole Christmas and normally we read the book and then we will watch one of the Grinches. We kind of rotate through who gets to pick because each of us has a favorite Grinch movie and they're all different. I think this year is Kevin's year to pick which probably means we're watching the original. We have Elf. We always read this book and watch Elf. This is normally like the first one we do because it's everybody's favorite and we typically have spaghetti for dinner. No, we do not add the candy to it but we will sometimes jokingly put candy and syrup on the table. We just don't actually put it in our spaghetti. Emily tried it one year. She said it was disgusting. We also have Home Alone and Home Alone 2. This is always one weekend when I know we're not going anywhere because we will stay up really late and actually read and watch both Home Alone 1 and Home Alone 2 in the same night. So like I think there's one weekend the entire month of December that we won't be going somewhere and so that's the Friday night that we will do Home Alone. And then we always save the Polar Express for as close to Christmas as possible. So I think this year it's like the 22nd or 23rd and then we read the Polar Express and watch that movie. Now, we don't do anything extravagant but we do discuss like what was different in the book in the movie. You know, which did you like better? Which version of the movie do you like better if there's multiple versions like The Grinch? We also obviously will be doing a very large Christmas Carol book versus movie study and so I think what my plan is for that is for us to do our family book and movie nights on Friday and then on Saturday night to watch a different version of the Christmas Carol through the entire month of December. So like the Muppets Christmas Carol, the Jim Carrey one, Scrooge, that's all I've got off the top of my head but that's what I think we're gonna do. So really we'll end up with like a family movie night every Friday and Saturday night and they'll both be tied into a book and a movie comparison. Now the last thing about Christmas school that we will be doing will be including a little bit of a Christmas-based writing and math that will include Christmas cards, thank you letters. Emily always gets to do this math budget project where she gets to buy for people when we make her budget and I have all of the details for that in a blog post. So I'm gonna link those for you in the description. I have a ton of different Christmas writing and math-based projects that we will be doing over the course of the month. Nothing crazy, just small little things that we can weave in here and there. We also will read a ton of Christmas picture books. We keep all of them right here in this basket and Emily gets to pick one whenever we have a downtime or multiples depending on how much downtime we have and we just snuggle up under the tree and drink something hot. Of course right now it's not exactly cold in Florida but it will be cold soon and we'll be drinking something hot and reading our picture books and we play a ton of Christmas games. We have a lot of Christmas themed games and we really enjoy playing them. We are typically playing a game every night after dinner at minimum during the Christmas season. So I'm also going to link our favorite Christmas books and games for you in the description as well. So make sure you check that out if you're looking for some more Christmas themed books and games to add to your Christmas school. And now I would absolutely love it if you would tell me do you guys Christmas school in your home school and if so what are your Christmas school plans for this year?