Christmas Week One

Away with the school schedule! The next 2 weeks we are having Christmas fun every day. We always look forward to this part of our homeschool year. We sat down on Monday with some idea books and wrote out all the things we wanted to do to lead us up to Christmas.

Made caramel apples. What do these have to do with Christmas? I don't know, but the girls really wanted to make them and EAT them. This is usually our Art Day. We looked at a few different artists' renditions of Madonna and Child from a book I have had since high school about the Prado museum.
We read "The Night Before Christmas." Wouldn't it be cool to memorize this?? I thought that last year and we attempted it--even got a few stanzas in. This year I thought the girls could use a little motivation and it worked. They earned a mini candy for each stanza memorized. Happy Hanukkah! We learned a little about what Jews believe, the Menorah and the miracle of the candle burning in the temple for 8 days. We played dreidel which is really fun, and would have sang songs, but we didn't know any!

We made up our own (sung to the tune of "Happy Holidays").

Happy Hanukkah (echo) Happy Hanukkah

repeat repeat

May your Menorah lights keep burning

Happy Hanukkah to you.

Ha Ha! I hope that's not sacriligious....

Made "Christingles."

Read "The Cat in the Manger."

Went to a local production of The Nutcracker.

Decorated Christmas tree cakes.

Read "The Elves and the Shoemaker."

7 more days to go!

Elfettes and Boggle

We are wrapping up our last week of "school" before the much anticipated Christmas break.
Today was one of those perfect school days--the kind I like to post. Why was it good? Maybe it was because we had a fellow school friend over for the day while her parents were away. This made school seem extra special AND there was no complaining! Strength in numbers!

We covered phonics, spelling, and handwriting with several rounds of Boggle--2nd grade style. That means 2 letter words were acceptable and proper names like Zed.

For math we had an introduction to multiplication. This is totally silly but it worked. We pretended I was Mrs. Claus and the girls were my "elf-ettes." Everyone knows that regular elves build toys but what do elf-ettes do? They help Mrs. Claus bake cookies. Afterall that is the diet secret that has kept Santa going strong for years.
Using blocks for cookies, and uno cards for cookie sheets Mrs. Claus gave instructions by writing on the dry-erase board.
3x3=
that meant make 3 groups of 3 or put 3 cookies on 3 different cookie sheets.
how many altogether? 9
so, 3x3=9
then it was 6x4= and so on, etc, etc.
The more ridiculous the scenario the more likely the more likely they'll remember the lesson...at least that's the hope I'm clinging to.

In between lessons they had breaks, cleaned rooms, did jobs, music practicing etc.

We had lunch in Spanish, reviewing food and colors.

In the afternoon we had quiet reading time--my favorite!!

In and around all that I somehow got the kitchen cleaned, living room vacuumed, floor swept, 2 loads of laundry, 3 French lessons, and this blog post! I guess this is one of those rare "Superwoman" days and the kind I definitely like to post to buoy me up on those "Slackerwoman" days.