Our Christmas School Picks for 2023

The Christmas season as a homeschooling family comes with a lot of decisions. So I’m sharing with you what our family will be doing in our homeschool through this Christmas season with our Christmas School picks for 2023.

When the holidays are approaching, you are now faced with the decision of how to approach the next few weeks of homeschooling. Really you have the option to take one of at least five pathways:

1. Continue school as you have been for the last several months.
2. Take off school for the month of December.
3. Completely change what you’re doing for school.
4. Add some holiday stuff to what you’re already doing to add some fun.
5. Some combination of the above.

Over the years, we have tried it all. Continuing school as usual often ends up with us all kinda burned out. If we take off, we end up having to really push to get the days in later in the year. Adding some to what we are already doing can make for some long days, but changing everything can make me feel like we’re getting behind in our studies!

AHHH! So what do we do?!?!?

The truth is, there is no right way to approach the holidays and homeschooling. Any one of these options is a completely viable option! So you choose and try them all and find what works for you!

But let me remind you that it’s good to take breaks. Don’t let yourself get burned out. It’s okay to enjoy the holiday season. If you need a break, take it!

Do the fun stuff! Sometimes a change is as good as a rest!

The older my kids get, the more I realize how little time I get with them. The schoolwork will always be there. They are good at learning and will continue to learn later. So enjoy the season with your kids while you have them!

I’m preaching to myself here.

So with that spirit, this year, my kids and I are going to do the fun stuff. And try to give ourselves a rest by changing up what we’re doing!

*Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase using the link. Please see my disclosure for more details.

My Christmas School Picks for 2023

I am not a person that goes all out with creating and crafting and doing everything DIY to make everything beautiful and perfect. I love to craft, but in life, I usually don’t have the time for all that! So I like to choose a few things that are approachable and easy.

This way, we can still have fun and do crafts, but there isn’t a ton of prep. Or supplies. And I hope that means you also can join in with us!

Advent

As a Christian family, we celebrate advent. We really enjoy having something special to look forward to each day. I use books and kits that are already laid out, and are open and go!

So here are our choices for this year.

Journey to the Manger

We are doing this advent book together, but it’s mostly for my youngest (6 year old). I’ve done this book with each of the others in the past, but not with her. We always enjoy it, so we are doing it again!

This book goes through the Christmas story, discussing one character of the story each day. There are fun discussions and activities to do together. Then there is a puzzle or fun page to color each day. And of course, you put a sticker up on the poster each day!

It’s a wonderul book to do with your children, especially elementary age.

Remarkable Advent

This is a wonderful book to read daily yourself or with your older children. Because there is a fairly large age range with my kids – from 13 to 6 – it’s hard for me to choose just one thing to do. So this book is geared more for my oldest but the youngers will get plenty out of it too!

I read this book myself last year, and enjoyed it so much I wanted to share it with my kids.

This is a wonderful retelling of the classic Christmas story. But it brings you in to the details. The thoughts of the people involved. The historical significance of each event. It helped me connect to the Christmas story in a new way. I highly recommend!

Emmanuel

This book, I am reading for my personal advent this year. I haven’t read it yet, but the intro already has me hooked! I’m looking forward to this one.

Each day has a short reading, and there are beautiful pictures throughout. The book is simply lovely!

I plan to read this each morning while I sip my coffee.

We also usually have some sort of Advent Calendar to open each day, but I wasn’t on top of getting one in time this year. And I’m not making one at this point! So it is what it is.

The past few years, we have done a lego advent calendar and my kids loved it. Who knows, maybe they’ll pull one of those back out to open each day!

A note about “getting behind” on advent readings and calendars. I honestly don’t worry about it! We mostly only do the readings as part of our school routines, so we often don’t do them over the weekend. So we make them up when we can. The kids never seem to mind adding two stickers to a calendar in one day! 🤪

For more ideas of what you could do for Advent, read my post What is Advent? Ideas to Celebrate the Season with Your Family.

Holiday Activities

I really enjoy reading picture books with my kids. Yes, even my older kids! They are a lot of fun and can naturally give way to some fun activities! So I have arranged a list of many of my favorite holiday books and activities we will be doing this season!

Some of these activities naturally are good for certain days, like learning about Winter Solstice on the first day of Winter. So for this reason, I have added them to a calendar and shared it below.

Will we get to all this? Probably not! But that’s ok. I don’t own all of these books, and may not be able to get them from my library at the right time to read it on the right day. No worries! I do hope to own them someday, they are all so good!

These activities and books can easily be moved to another day as needed. Or skip something! But if you have the desire and ability to do it all, this list will be a lot of fun and honestly pretty easy to implement!

Here’s the same books and activities in list form:

• Read A World of Cookies for Santa. Make your favorite cookie recipe from the back of the book!
• Read The Carpenter’s Gift. Make a star ornament.
• Read Christmas Farm and learn about Christmas trees. Go on a walk and look for Christmas trees in nature.
• Dec. 6: Today is St. Nicholas Day! Read about The Legend of Saint Nicholas. Make some St. Nicholas cookies!
• Dec. 7: Hannukah begins. Read The Story of Hannukah. Play dreidel.
• Make a gingerbread house with cookies or stickers.
• Read Cobweb Christmas. Make a cobweb ornament.
• Read Shooting at the Stars. Write a letter to someone in the military.
• Dec. 13: Today is St. Lucia Day! Read Lucia Morning in Sweden. Make Lucia Buns and dress up!
• Read An Orange for Frankie. Eat an orange for a treat.
• Dec. 15: Hannukah ends. Read Hershel and the Hannukah Goblins and Oskar and the Eight Blessings.
• Make cookies and do a cookie exchange with friends.
• Learn about snowflakes by reading Snowflake Bentley. Then make a snowflake with pipe cleaners or paper!
• Make an ornament of your choice!
• Dec. 21: Today is Winter Solstice! Read The Shortest Day and do one of the activities from the back of the book.
• Watch a favorite Christmas movie!
• Dec. 25: Merry Christmas!

Regular schoolwork

My plan at this point is to continue with our regular school routine, but much of what we do will change. We will still begin our days with our Morning Time, but most of what we include will be our advent readings. We will also continue reading our novel for history, as well as passages from our science book as normal.

Once we are finished with our daily readings, I plan on doing our other holiday activities. The days we have what we need to do the activities, we will skip our bookwork except for math. Math is hard to get back into after being off for weeks at a time.

I do anticipate my 13 year old not being too keen on some of the activities this month. He’s not too into crafting and cooking, so I won’t force the activities on him. Though even if he isn’t directly participating, he often will end up shuffling in at some point.

So he will end up doing more regular school work than my younger two. I plan on playing all of that by ear. I want him to have a break as well.

Even when my kids aren’t doing their assigned lessons, they are often still filling their brains with great knowledge and wonderful activities. They enjoy being outside, reading books, building things, doing art, and all sorts of things I consider educational in many ways.

So whether or not we are checking off the writing assignments planned long ago, we will still be checking off school days!

A wonderful addition to your homeschool is to use some copy work in your daily activities! This can help with your child’s handwriting, spelling, and even grammar.

You can add in some fun quotes, Christmas songs, or a sentence from your reading. Many families also enjoy writing Bible verses for copywork.

For advent, I have created a free downloadable set of copywork pages you can use with your kids – or yourself! It has pages for the whole month with Bible verses that relate to the Christmas story!

Download your copy here.

Questions?

What if we can’t get to it all?

I’ll be honest, we won’t get to it all either! I purposefully kept our plans fairly light this year, so hopefully we will get to a lot of things, but I’m not worried about not gettting to it all! If we do some of this, we will still be making memories.

But one of the points of doing these fun activities is that it is fun! If I get stressed about it, it will ruin the fun. So we will do what we do. Skip what we can’t get to. And if we get “behind”, we might do extra one day, we might skip it, or we might continue the fun past Christmas Day!

What if my family isn’t religious?

There are many wonderful ways you can celebrate the holidays when you are not religious. Many of the activities I included above under the section “Holiday Activities” are not religious. But they are fun and encourage warm memories and an attitude of giving. So feel free to use my ideas, or add any activities you’d rather!

I personally also enjoy experiencing other cultures and religions with my kids. For instance, we are not jewish but enjoy learning about Hannukah and playing dreidel!

For more ideas, be sure to check out some of my other posts with ideas for the holidays!
75+ Ways to Create Holiday Traditions this Christmas
Christmas Around the World: Holiday Books for Your Homeschool
Christmas Books to Enjoy with Your Kids this Season

What about covering school subjects?

I love the idea of only doing fun activities at Christmas time, but it can be hard for me to let go of the idea that we have to spend time on all the subjects every day of every school year. Feeling the need to do math, writing, reading, history, and science every day. But why do we feel this way?

Maybe your state requires certain subjects to be done. Mine actually does. Plus I feel the responsibility of their learning, and making sure they are learning all the things. But the truth is that kids are like little sponges and will soak up knowledge whenever they are given the opportunity.

They all will have different interests and motivations. And it’s good to expose them to a wide variety of information and ideas. But do we have to monitor every word that goes into their brains? Definitely not!

Plus, if you are already doing a solid job of helping your kids learn through the rest of year, it’s totally ok to back off for a couple weeks for the holidays! And if your kids are anything like mine, even when they are not doing their assigned learning, they find many other things to learn!

They are always exploring things outside, reading books, playing games, building things, making art…all that is learning! But its hard to trust that its okay.

But sometimes skipping all schoolwork is hard on students who need routine or who need to continue learning so they don’t forget. For this reason, I will often continue doing some math pages even over breaks sometimes. And we’ll often practice reading skills.

So while kids can learn easily from more than just workbooks and textbooks, it’s still okay to continue to use those things if they are working for your children and you feel it is needed. You don’t have to ditch them completely. We won’t be!

You could also incorporate those subjects in alternative ways. Cooking involves math. You could have your kids read a picture book to you to practice their reading skills instead of you reading to them.

Many families will do copywork for their kids writing skills. This helps with handwriting, spelling, and even grammar. You simply give your student a sentence or two to copy in their own writing. Simple.

The holidays is a super easy time to incorporate copywork! You can simply pull a sentence from a book you read, or use fun songs or quotes. Many families will use Bible verses.

I have created a set of easy copywork pages for Christmas for a free download you can use with your kids. Each page has a Bible verse that relates to the Christmas story! You can download your copy here.

What will you do this season?

There is so much you can do during the holidays as a homeschooling family. This season is a wonderful time of year to bring some fun and joy into your homeschool and enjoy the time with your kids. Yes, you can count all the fun and food and activities as school! So make a change this season and enjoy the holidays with your kids! I hope some of the ideas of what we will be doing is an inspiration for your family!

So what will you be doing with your kids this season? I’d love to hear about it! Let me know in the comments below!

Related Articles

What is Advent? Ideas to Celebrate the Season with Your Family

75+ Ways to Create Holiday Traditions this Christmas

Christmas Around the World: Holiday Books for Your Homeschool

Christmas Books to Enjoy with Your Kids this Season