How to Homeschool at Christmas Time

Happy December everyone!

It’s only 11 days before Christmas. How is your homeschooling going this week? If you don’t homeschool or are struggling with it this week, you probably wonder how to homeschool at Christmas time. I’ll show you what we’re doing this year, which isn’t the same as last year or won’t be the same next year. Why? Because the even the stars are not the limit.

At our home, we have a lot going on: Right now, my kids are dreaming about what they’ll get for Christmas. 2 of my kids are participating in a Shakespeare class that starts Christmas break this week- one son needs to listen, watch, or read several more Shakespeare plays/movies by tomorrow. In 1 month, we’re moving again. Plus, we spent an entire day driving back to our last town for orthodontist appointments (2-3 hours each way, depending on traffic) on Wednesday.

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We spent a lot of time focused on educational activities on Monday and Tuesday.  Same thing on Wednesday morning, before heading on our day long trip to the appointments. Now that it’s Thursday, we’re pretty tired.

We’re taking it easy by listening to some engaging audio books that my kids were excited about. One of the books we’re listening to is part of the Goosebumps series: Escape from Horrorland. It was a fun change of pace to hear the audio version narrated by Suzy Jackson. Not only is she good with voicing the different characters, there are sound effects to go along with the story. My kids thought they wouldn’t like hearing it read by someone else. It has to be much better than listening to my worn out voice for a couple hours.


Throughout the week, we’ve also read some other entertainment books: Fablehaven, Horrorland # 10 Help We Have Strange Powers!, and Magic Treehouse #46 Dogs in the Dead of Night.

My main goal for the week was to help 3 of my kids improve their reading skills with more dedication to doing Barton Reading and Spelling lessons each day instead of a few days per week. I’m motivated because 2 of the 3 struggle significantly with reading and letter recognition. 1 also struggles with spelling and asks a younger brother how to spell. I can’t imagine how hard it is to enter a circle filled with their peers, who presumably had no challenges with reading such as dyslexia. Since we’re moving again in January, they’ll be doing just that.

My 6 year old, Jesse, is very active and loves to do anything creative. So, I’ve struggled with how to use that in our Barton lessons. I tried a variety of techniques that worked with older siblings to no avail. This week, I figured it out! When he completes a task, I let him create a short tune with a harmonica! TA DA! Now, he looks forward to sitting down and doing the lessons. His attention span now allows him to dive deeper into the lesson. WIN WIN!

Math

Cami, 8, wanted a bigger challenge with math. So I recently introduced multiplication. I had some worksheets from education.com to get her started. We like to use manipulatives to assist kids as they begin to grasp new math concepts. This week, we used Honey Nut Scooters. The way I explain how to find the product of 2 factors is (5×6) is that there are 5 groups of 6. She made 5 groups with 6 cereal pieces each. What could make math be more enjoyable than adding food?

Ethan and Isaac prefer to read Life of Fred math books because they come in story form. Not only does this format make it easier to remember what is taught, it demonstrates how and why it is needed.

Computer Science & Graphic Art

I also found out that my oldest son is interested in making his own Memes. Fortunately for him, I bought Affinity Designer earlier this year because I love making my own graphics for use on my social media channels, blogs, emails and for printing out various projects.

Money Saving Note: Affinity Designer attracts a lot of people like you and me because you pay for it once and that’s it- unlike a competitor that has a monthly subscription fee.

He says that his first meme was inspired by the Wicked Witch of the West because we’re always talking about her. When you confine the Wicked Witch of the West down to the initials, you’ll find that you get WWW. So, whenever you enter in a website address, you start with www. Which means, by extension, we’ve always been using Wicked Witch of the West without even realizing it.

It was his first time using the program and his first meme and he created it in 15 minutes. Part of that time was figuring out the font and font size, looking at a few other memes to see what made them great, and studying the placement of the words. He also studied the Fair Use Act to make sure he wasn’t infringing on any copyrights or breaking any laws. TA DA! It was THAT easy.

More Math

Another cool thing that happened this week: A lady from church who homeschooled her kids for 11+ years approached me about some supplies she was getting rid of. The highlight was a Cuisenaire Rod set.

Jesse loves building, figuring out patterns, and designing. So, I gave him the biggest rod and asked him to get some of the other rods and put them together that would be the same size. He loved it. He came up with several ways. I was impressed. They’ve been his favorite activity all week.

Money Saving Note: Don’t go to Amazon to get a set. Ebay is much cheaper! You’ll save more than $60 (at the time this post was created).

There’s one more thing. Caleb wanted to do a senior project along the lines of building a computer from scratch. I told him that he needed to earn the money to pay for it. He has taken on a few odd jobs through my friends and my husband’s brother and saved up enough to buy a used computer on eBay that didn’t come with a graphics card (GPU) and a hard drive. I had a spare hard drive and told him that if he put some of his money toward it, I’d pay for the rest of the GPU for a Christmas present. I already had an unused Windows 10 Pro license.

He had to figure out how to install Windows without any background with installing an OS. Each time he put the OS onto his thumb drive, he ran into errors until he reformatted the hard drive with the right format. The tricky part of the process for reformatting is that my computer is an iMac, which doesn’t have NTSC as an option. He chose to use Fat32, then was able to get the Windows installation on his thumb drive to reformat it again so that Windows could be installed.

After he got it up and running without the GPU, it’s not Christmas yet and the GPU is still on its way here, he let Isaac play Roblox and several other games that didn’t need a GPU. On Tuesday night, the computer crashed and refused to open Windows. Today, he reinstalled Windows after trying to repair it (he spent the entire morning working on it- so he must have tried different strategies).

Anyway, this has taught him a lot about computers.

What computer did he end up with? An HP Compaq Elite 8200 i5 2500 @ 3.3GHz – 4Gb RAM – DVD-RW – No HDD

My kids like inviting friends over to play World of Tanks, World of Warships, and other games. They also like to play against each other. So, I decided to buy another computer to have him practice his skills and make it easier to play. I chose a Dell OptiPlex 790 Intel Core i5-2400 3.1GHz 4GB RAM 320GB and he put Windows 10 on it as well after buying another license.

His seminary teacher and my mom both have computers they want to part with, so we’re taking them so he can continue to practice setting up and installing components and OSs. Those computers will very likely run Windows 7. We’ll see how that goes once we have them.

In the mean time, as I was writing this post, he got his computer up and running again. He is testing out the mobile version of World of Tanks and got a 38-45 frame rate without a GPU and using Windows’ Game Mode (something he didn’t have on my iMAC).




Culinary Arts

Jared decided to revisit his interest in cooking and cooking tools. I probably mentioned this before, but his favorite resource is America’s Test Kitchen and its sister companies Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country because they explain how they reached their conclusions in a scientific format.

Some of the things he researched:

  • were recipes
  • knife sharpeners
  • Instant Pots and their competitors: https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/595-testing-multicookers-electric-pressure-cookers?extcode=MASCM00L0&ref=new_search_experience_2
  • gloves to use while cutting food to prevent injuries.

This is something that he can take with him for the rest of his life. I’m sure the people he meets in the future (dates and his future wife) will love his talent. The benefits for the rest of us is that he ordered a knife sharpener and our knives are sharp plus we got to experience some delectable dishes. YUM!




The main thing I hope you walk away with from today’s post is that homeschooling right before Christmas can be painless when we use a little creativity and let our kids’ interests be the guide.

There is still one more week before Christmas and there will be other days/weeks where providing educational opportunities will take some ingenuity and cleverness. What are some things that you’ve done to keep the educational ball rolling as an hectic, thrilling, or enjoyable day approaches? Please share in the comments below. I’d love to find out what resourceful families do.

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