Lesson 8: Take a break and enjoy some holiday science {Season 3, Episode 57}

The holidays are just around the corner, which is exciting and it’s also the perfect time to switch things up a bit! For this lesson, we are going to talk about how we handle the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, including three tips for holiday science.

Welcome to Season 3 of The Tips for Homeschool Science Show. This season, I am sharing 10 lessons I have learned in my ten plus years of homeschooling.  I hope that all of them will help you on your homeschooling journey!

{Disclaimer - I don't claim to know everything there is to know about homeschooling, but these ten lessons are ones that I have found important and useful in my homeschooling journey. And I trust that you will too.}

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Lesson 8 Transcripts

As the holidays rapidly approach, I thought I would share a lesson that I learned in my very first year of homeschooling. And that was to take a break from our regular science plans and add in a bit of holiday science fun instead.

Y’all already know that I am a Type-A homeschooler who loves to check boxes. So the idea of taking a few weeks off in the middle of the year for the holidays made me twitch a bit at the beginning of our homeschooling journey.

But over the years, I have learned that the handful of weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are a vortex of craziness where my kiddos are bouncing off the walls and homeschooling motivation has left the building. So in order to rein things in a bit, we typically switch to Christmas school during those weeks.

When my kiddos were younger, we would switch everything to a Christmas theme – Christmas math, Christmas phonics, Christmas science, and more. Now that kiddos are not babies, my youngest is in 3^rd and my oldest is a senior in high school, it looks a bit different.

For morning time, which we do together, we read the Christmas story, we enjoy Christmas poems, listen to Christmas music as we do a bit of holiday science together. Then, our oldest goes off to finish her day of online classes – high school is hard work!

Our son and I do get a bit of grammar and math done, as I find that those are the two things that we need to keep working on each day. But after that, we’ll bake cookies, do a Christmas art project, or just read a book or two off our stack of holiday-themed library books we checked out.

Some years, we have done a unit-study on holidays around the world. Some years we have studied different holiday symbols. But every year, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are a slow version of Christmas school filled with books, art, baking music, and a bit of holiday science fun.

Here are a few things that I do to make our Christmas school science plans go a bit smoother:

#1 – Do a bit of research for ideas.

Every year bloggers share new ideas for holiday activities, plus there are new books available. So I start by gathering a list of things that I would like to do over the holiday season. There’s a good chance that we won’t get to all of these ideas, but at least it’s a start!

#2 – Make a holiday activity grab bag.

After I finish researching, I’ll print off about half the activities I found. I’m a pen-and-paper kind of gal, so I like to have it all in hand. Then, I’ll gather the supplies for those activities and put it all in a box. This way, I can grab and go when the mood strikes.

#3 – Invite a few friends to join in!

And finally, we like to have a few friends join us to bake cookies. And in between batches, we do one of the science or art activities from the grab bag I made.

In a Nutshell

For us, Christmas school is rather simple and a lot more laid back than our normal homeschooling plans. But with a bit of research for ideas, a holiday activity grab bag, and a few friends to join in, we always have a whole lot of holiday-themed science fun. I love that we can enjoy the slower pace of homeschool during the hectic days that surround the holidays. And my kids enjoy the break from the normal routine!

Additional Resources

If you need a few holiday science ideas, we have got you covered. For the third year in a row, we will be releasing a Christmas Science eBook with ideas for how you can add a bit of science to your holiday plans. The 2018 edition will have 25 ideas for holiday science experiments and winter nature study.

This eBook will be available only during the last week of November and just like before, all the profits will go to Toys for Tots. So mark your calendar for Monday, November 26^th so you won’t miss the release of the 3^rd annual Christmas Science eBook!

• Learn more about the 2018 Christmas Science eBook