What Christmas Break is to traditional schooling families “Christmas School” is to Home Educating Families. Simply put, Christmas School is when homeschooling families step away from most or all academic subjects in order to fully immerse themselves in beautiful holiday picture books, crafts, and recipes. Our homeschool is no exception. We typically still have our morning Bible reading time, handwriting, language arts, reading, and math instruction but after that it’s Christmas all day every day. Some years Christmas School has looked like a full blown magazine shoot for children’s holiday crafts is happening in our home and other years we’ve navigated seasonal viruses and fit in what we can. But every year we try to make room for all the holiday magic I hope fills my daughter’s memories.
Many homeschool curriculum companies and content creators put together Christmas guides and while there are many wonderful options out there we have returned time and time again to those created by The Peaceful Press. In years past we have used The Peaceful Press Christmas Guide and truly loved it. When my daughter started to age out of the activities in that guide I wondered what we’d do next but as it turns out I did not have to look far because the Peaceful Press released a Christmas Guide Volume 2. We began working through it in the holiday season of 2022 but (remember those seasonal viruses I mentioned earlier?) we finished it this year.
The Christmas Guide Volume 2 is a literature and project-based four week guide for students ages 3-6, though my daughter enjoyed the guide thoroughly at ages 8 and 9. It’s a wholesome guide that has gentle supplements to math and reading instruction, Bible lessons, art projects, and opportunities to engage in community service. It also includes all of the printables you may need, several recipes, and a phenomenal Christmas picture book list. Each week has its own theme which offers a glimpse into the different curriculum options The Peaceful Press offers.
We spent our first week exploring offerings that fit into the Nourishing Nature portion of The Peaceful Press curriculum. We read beautiful books, reviewed compound words, practiced skip counting, and explored nature themes such as evergreen trees and winter birds. We loved making clay ornaments of winter animals and giant paper bag snowflakes to decorate our homeschool room. Our week ended with a sweet snack to enjoy while we revisited our favorite books from the week.
The second week of The Christmas Guide Volume 2 introduced topics related to American History that students would encounter in the Peaceful Pioneers curriculum. We read about cozy Christmases on the farm and spent many leisurely afternoons hand sewing felt animal ornaments. I’d been meaning to teach my daughter beginning hand sewing stitches and embroidery and I’m thankful for the little extra push this guide gave me in that direction. She is quite proud of her little animal ornaments which I will treasure always. We reviewed some phonics rules, worked on our fractions, and then did a lot of math with fractions as we multiplied the ingredients in the week’s hot cocoa mix recipe to create jarred mixes for every family in our homeschool co-op, over one dozen!
The third week of The Christmas Guide Volume 2 introduced themes related to the Kind Kingdom curriculum and European history. We enjoyed some European Christmas picture books and danced along to The Nutcracker. We made ornaments to give family members as gifts and baked a delicious gingerbread cake. The Peaceful Press has kindly allowed me to share their recipe for gingerbread; you’ll find it at the bottom of this blog post along with little extra tips from us!
Sadly we were not able to finish week four last year as we were sick one week in December. However, one of the true blessings of Peaceful Press seasonal guides is the ability to pick up any place you want and get started. We picked up where we left off with Week 4 this year and had a great time. The final week of The Christmas Guide Volume 2 explores themes related to The Precious People curriculum so we were able to enjoy different Christmas traditions from around the world. We made birdseed ornaments for our backyard friends, rolled beeswax candles, crafted a lovely clay candle holder and made a special orange cake which we enjoyed as we welcomed the first Sunday of Advent this year.
We thoroughly enjoyed this guide. It was an easy add-on to our academic day and complemented our usual math and reading lessons quite well while allowing lots of room for Christmas magic. If you’d like to see more of how we used this sweet seasonal study be sure to visit my instagram page where I have a saved “Christmas” highlight with peeks of our days. I’d also love to hear from you when you bake your own gingerbread so please be sure to tag me!
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