The Holidays are Coming!

While you and your children are recovering from a post-Halloween sugar crash today, I have an idea for you to consider.  Take a moment to plan ahead and set some realistic homeschool goals BEFORE the holiday season is upon you!  We are just twenty-two short days away from Thanksgiving and I’m sure that your calendar is already beginning to fill up with fun family activities! 

There are a couple of ways that you can gear up for this special time of year that will leave you unhurried and unworried where your end of year homeschool goals are concerned.  First, if you are schooling middle and high school age children,  there will be portions of your curriculum that you find they simply need to push through and complete. That’s fine, but consider keeping those required assignments to a minimum leading up to Christmas.  Starting the day with a dose of history reading, completing a science lab, or working through a math lesson doesn’t take much time each day and leaves time for you and your pre-teen or teen to engage in family activities that will create life-long memories. Some unencumbered time also gives all of you the flexibility to be spontaneous; This will give you time to attend a concert, or play, visit an elderly friend, or volunteer for an organization that helps those in need.

Another way that you can approach the holidays while continuing to school your kiddos, is to modify their curriculum.  This works especially well when your children are in elementary school.  It is entirely possible for your children to continue learning or practicing their spelling, reading, writing, and math content by incorporating lessons that check the “concepts learned” boxes while infusing your schooling with some holiday cheer! 

Spelling - Switch your spelling words to holiday words that your kids are probably eager to use in their writing anyway. 

Reading - Take your reading lessons to a whole new level of excitement by adding in some age appropriate holiday favorites.

Writing - Have your kids write letters to family and friends.  This is a great way for your kids to express how thankful they are for their grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and close friends.  Writing their own holiday tales or rewriting much loved holiday stories with a new twist is also a fun way to practice their writing skills – oh, and these stories, bound and illustrated, make great gifts for grandparents! 

Math - Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, telling time, fractions, measurement, calendar concepts, colors, numbers, counting (just to name a few math skills) can all be taught or reviewed while baking cookies, counting down to Christmas day, decorating for the holidays and wrapping gifts! 

Let your imagination be your guide and then take photos, keep copies of writing samples, and add those holiday stories they read to their book list.  This will document your learning adventures for your evaluator and leave you a lasting record of all the fun things that you did this year!

With just a little forethought you and your children can spend this holiday season deep in learning - and loving every minute of it!  You, as their homeschool teacher, can rest easy knowing that you have a plan in place that will keep you and your children on track for reaching all of this year’s homeschooling goals!