Homeschooling in the Holidays: A Simple Routine

It never fails: every November, at the end of the month, I feel the itch to loosen our school schedule (which is already fairly loose to begin with, ha!) and lean into the excitement and expectancy of the advent season. There is much to celebrate, much to anticipate, and a shift of focus feels exceedingly appropriate. Homeschooling in the holidays can be different than the rest of the year, and that is a good thing!

We spent the week of Thanksgiving in Georgia visiting family, and although we didn’t do even a scratch of “school,” the kids learned about geography and different varieties of plants and birds and how cotton fields look and visited an aviation museum and made crafts with Grandma and read lots of books and listened to stories from around the world on their favorite podcast and tallied up license plates from different states and watched me dissect a turkey and so much more. Road trips are excellent learning opportunities – no classroom required! We are now back home again and looking ahead to homeschooling in the holidays (and the winter months to follow). Here’s what our school will look like during the next month.

Next week we are going to pause our schedule we’ve been following all fall and instead begin working through A Connected Christmas. We’ve never done this study before, but I used her Easter study last year and we had such a good experience with it that I wanted to try this one also. I don’t do a lot of unit studies and at this point in our homeschool career I don’t want to buy a lot of new curriculum, but this one feels worthwhile because a) the main focus is on reading a Scripture passage and then having the children write or draw about it (aka narration, very much Charlotte-Mason-approved!) and b) it has plenty of ideas for simple activities but we can pick and choose how little or much to do and c) it’s just different than what we usually do, and at this point in the school year a change is quite refreshing.

We’ll also keep up with piano practice each week and hopefully squeeze in some math. I have several projects of gifts we are going to make which I cannot describe at this time because they may or may not be going to some of my readers and such information is highly classified. Besides that, we also like to read lots of picture books in December (Read Aloud Revival has an excellent and extensive list), hopefully play in the snow that will hopefully descend upon us soon, bake cookies, eat cookies, go on some chilly hikes, decorate a tree, go caroling, bake more cookies, eat more cookies, watch my weight-loss progress grind to a halt as a result of said cookies, and participate in our church’s Christmas cantata and our homeschool choir concert.

We are trying something new this Christmas in which we have decided not to exchange gifts within our immediate family. It is an Experiment, and we will have to report back to you in January as to how traumatic it was for everyone involved, but our hope is to slightly shift the focus of Christmas away from gifts and materialism and towards Christ and his birth. This is not to say that everyone who gives gifts is materialistic! Personally I love both the giving and the receiving of gifts. I think it can be a meaningful way of showing our love and we will continue to do that at other times, but we also feel strongly that our children have too many possessions already and could use a break from the onslaught of “stuff.”

We shared this plan with the children a few weeks ago and they were surprisingly fine with it (which again tells me that they really don’t need anything more). To fill this “gift-opening void” we told the kids that we will plan some family activities together and also think of a cause or a family in need to which we can give. I would love to fill our children’s Christmas memories with more experiences together and fewer “things;” with an awareness of the needs around them and the ways they can serve; and with an awe and reverence for the miracle of Christ’s sacrificial love in coming to this broken and sinful earth. We shall see if this year helps to move us toward that goal.

I know you’ve all been waiting on the edges of your virtual seats, eager to know if Stinker Baby is sleeping through the night, and I’m here to report that he… is not. We finally, successfully weaned him off his middle-of-the-night bottle but he continues to wake up at least once each night and yell for a while, just to keep us on our toes. It’s fine, we’re fine, fourteen months of sleep deprivation is JUST FINE. Gahhhhhhhhhhhh.

In all seriousness though, I think we have finally realized that there are many things we cannot control, and making our baby sleep is one of them. We’ve tried the methods & routines & had him cry it out for hours on end and it turns out that he is a strong-willed little guy who just doesn’t love to sleep. We are learning patience, compassion, and more patience – and ultimately the only thing that we can control here is our own attitude in the face of many, many nights of too little sleep. He is slowly improving, and we are in a much better place than we were a year ago, so I still have hope that he will someday sleep all night long – and I’ll try not to talk/complain about it here too much more except to encourage any of you moms in the same boat! By all means, try the methods, try Babywise (which worked so well for all our other kids), try to cry it out if you can – sometimes it works great! – but ultimately our kids are individuals and we cannot control every aspect of their lives and personalities the way that we may want to.

There may be a broader application here to parenting in general. We can not, should not, actually control our children or their behavior. We can encourage the character or behavior we want, discourage what we don’t want, and influence the environment (as Babywise and other sleep-training methods do) in order to make it as easy and as natural as possible for them to go along with our desires – but ultimately they have a choice and they might resist. You know the saying : “You can lead a horse to water…”

Learning is the same way. How do you explain to a child what “2+2=4” means? You can show them, demonstrate with objects, draw pictures, tell stories to illustrate it, but all you are actually doing is encouraging their understanding and giving them the opportunity to respond. You cannot actually force a little child’s brain to UNDERSTAND what this abstract concept means. It may click, or it may not. We can create an environment conducive to learning but we – neither parents, nor teachers – do not make it happen.

This is because children are not robots to be programmed or controlled but real, unique persons from the moment they are born. Ultimately, I do not want to control my children! I want them to have self-control, in which they have the courage and strength to choose to make the right decision when Mom and Dad are not around – even when, especially when it is difficult.

Our little guy, of course, knows nothing about all this. But we love him anyways and we continue to pray for patience and grace and endurance and naps and strong coffee. I thank God for giving us the privilege of being his (imperfect and slightly frazzled) parents!

And I thank you for reading, today and always. I don’t say it enough, but I greatly appreciate your prayers and encouragement!

Originally written November 29 2022