It's beginning to look alot like Christmas

We are going to take a break from our usual MFW units and spend the whole month focusing on Christmas.

Over at Hubbard's Cupboard they have an amazing Christmas unit celebrating the birth of Christ.  They have daily activities to celebrate Christmas and the birth of Christ.  We are doing an Christmas Countdown Chain that corresponds to all the activities on the site. On each chain loop is slip of paper pasted inside with a scripture passage or Christmas book to read, a memory verse to focus on and a related craft or activity to do.   Find it all here.  We strung up our chain over his circle time area (to the left hanging from ceiling). 

We start out our day with Circle Time...the only difference is that we have added in a Santa Claus Countdown to Christmas to our routine!    I have recently moved our school room into the sunroom/playroom and out of the dining room.  It is great...that is until it started raining and I realized there is a leak...but that is another post...

Circle Time consists of:

Pledge to the American Flag, Pledge to the Bible, Go over God's Standard verses for our School Day, Calendar, Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow, Writing the Day, Date, and Code Date, Tally Marks for the month, Coins in the amount of day's date, Weather, and 100 Chart.

Then James goes through his binder independently...well, that is the idea anyway!  We are working on the independent part slowly.  We have good days and bad days!  I love this idea of having a binder from Ms. Meachem's website.  This is always his first workbox.  It is basically the same as the circle time activities, for weather he does a graph. I even have a countdown to Christmas for him in his individual binder...but it's nativity themed with star stickers found here (look under day one). 

The next workbox this month is a math workbook.  Currently our focus is on clocks/time...but after that we will move on to measurements.

We also do Spanish each day in our workbox routine.  It is a video curriculum called Salsa.

For the remaining workboxes its all about Christmas and fun!

We made these handprint peppermint candies. 

We played a Christmas Bible Verses Matching Game. We found these last year at Christian Preschool Printables.

 

James practiced his sight words by building snowmen using this file folder game found at www.childcareland.com  I can't find the exact link, but it's there somewhere!  Here's another cute version...I may print this out eventually...it's found  here.

In addition to doing our Christmas chain each day we are going to work on a lapbook of the symbols of Christmas.  I am going to try my best to match up the symbols each day to the Christmas Chains focus, but at some point that won't work, because the Christmas Chain is all about Christ's birth, where as not all Christmas symbols are based on that...Santa, elves, reindeer...etc!

So our first Christmas symbol we focused on was actually the colors of Christmas because James had asked just the day before about why green was a Christmas color.  This was spurred on by why we did our Christmas Chain in red and green.  He knew about red already, and it brought tears to my eyes as he described that it reminds us of the blood that Jesus shed for us on the cross.  So I figured I would jump right into it!

We also practiced some spelling/word recognition with bottle caps.  I wrote out cards with two sides, one word on each side....his name, and our family's names, some sight words, as well as the words of the units we are studying in MFW this year.   I got inspired with the idea from here...

We also got into the Christmas Spirit by having a Music and Movement time...otherwise known as turn up the Christmas music as loud as we can stand it and dance dance dance.  I love Christmas music, and apparently so do my kids.  It was so much fun!!!  I hate I didn't have my camera, but I left it at church, boo. All these photos are with my laptop camera...wow, it's bad, but better than nothing!  I also made the kids into a elves on a cute thing I found on facebook.  We laughed and laughed and laughed!  It was so much fun.

I hope to blog more often and record what we are doing...we'll see!  Today the roof started leaking in the playroom...which is now the school room and the little pieces of ceiling starting falling off...so we had to move all our stuff across the room to safety...so we will see how that puts a damper on me blogging...most of my free time will be setting up another area for school for now...and cleaning up the mess.  We have a tarp on the roof now, so at least that stopped the leaking for now, yeah!