Home School Holidays

by Teri Spray

How can I keep up with home schooling during the holidays?
The holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year can provide unique opportunities as well as challenges for even the most dilligent homeschool families. It is important to understand that few American teachers expect significant academic progress in the weeks between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Most first semester academic progress is scheduled between the beginning of the school year and the Thanksgiving Holiday. Second semester progress is usually found between the New Year and Easter. After Easter, spring fever hits and it becomes a good time for special projects and field trips.

Take a good look at your curriculum and try to adjust your assignments to coincide with your holiday festivities. Limit your bookwork, because your children may be distracted. Rather than teaching new concepts, use games and drills to keep skills intact and prevent a January slump as you return to your routine.

I enjoyed integrating holiday projects and programs right into our curriculum. We counted special holiday acvtivities as part of our school program. We have some friends who enjoyed learning about the pilgrims and created a family tradition of “Pilgrim Month” during November. For weeks each November they lived without electricity! They read by lamp light, cooked on woodstoves and warmed themselves by the fire. Other home educating families schedule the entire month of December as vacation and do not even try to juggle school around family visits, travel, shopping, wrapping and cooking.

Despite the busy-ness of the season, you can still work on your basic skills within the holiday preparations. What better way to practice capitalization and punctuation than to address numerous Christmas cards? We enjoyed creating a “Jesse Tree” during advent which is a pictorial presentation of the geneology of Jesus Christ. We studied most of the Old Testament as we colored symbols and pictures of the Jesse Tree. Then we made the pictures into ornaments which we hung on the tree chronologically each day as Christmas approached. It gave us a whole new meaning to “fullness of time”! (Small Ventures has published a simple easy-to-use Jesse Tree curriculum. (214) 681-1728.)

By balancing your basics of intstruction with the beauty of the season, we hope you can enjoy the holidays with your children without compromising your home school program. Have a blessed Holiday Season!