Christmas School

Starting the week after Thanksgiving, we jumped into Christmas School a la Read Aloud Revival. Four weeks focused on some of Jan Brett's classic Christmas (slash winter) picture books was just the perfect way to school through December. Not everything is pictured here, but we enjoyed The Mitten, The Wild Christmas Reindeer, The Hat, Christmas Trolls and The Night Before Christmas and plenty of learning and fun to fill the month! Here are the highlights (aka the things I thought to take pictures of):

A little Christmasy history one morning.

Our nature walk to find and study a coniferous tree was
lovely, but did not yield any conifers (I swear there was
at least one evergreen on our North Arm trail, but apparently
not!). So we enjoyed our snowy walk and then came home to
study the various pines and spruces and firs in our yard (and living room!).

Not really Christmas schooly, but math
was just regular math anyway, and both kids
had assignments to take a survey and then
graph their results. Here's Sam's data collection
about Minecraft preferences.

The Christmas school book club plans were for
Jan Brett's version of the mitten, which we love,
but this one is the one I grew up with and will always
hold a place in my heart.

The reindeer cookies they suggested to go with Wild Christmas
Reindeer didn't have great reviews, plus I wanted to my our fave gingersnaps
anyway, so I just combined the two ideas into these goofy (but delicious)
reindeer cookie treats.

Since most of Jan Brett's books that we were enjoying this month
had a Scandinavian influence, I found this book at the library
to help us learn a bit about the customs, history and traditions of
these Nordic countries. We read a few pages a day, and learned a lot!

Some great nonfiction with excellent pics to go along with our
reindeer studies.

And reindeer ornaments were a super fun
afternoon activity.

Sam wasn't into the crafting as much as Cal, but he
did humor me with this (antler-less) reindeer creation.

And he made this one to give to Zoe for Christmas.
(And then he was off playing or reading something else.)

Cal, on the other hand, loves the crafty life, and found lots
of different reindeer ornaments to make for lots of grandparents.
This afternoon of listening to classic Christmas songs while making
ornaments reminded me so much of growing up and doing the same thing
with my mom. When I shared that memory with her, she said she did the same
with her mom. Such a fun chain of memories for all of us.

These are part of a really great series we found at the library.
We mostly flipped through and looked at the pictures and read
a few interesting tidbits. We love chapter 10 which always has a game
and a recipe from the country, and we made a few of those.

We love latkes and these were a really delicious way
to celebrate what we learned about Ukraine.

I had no idea what to expect with these cookies.
I thought they'd be more like shortbread. But they were
soft and fluffy, like bread. Gregg called them a mix
between a pancake and a sugar cookie and they were really
tasty.

Making Norwegian Kringla.

We got creative with our shaping.

It’s always fun to read and look at different retellings
(and re-illustrations) of folk tales. Here’s a great collection, all wonderful.

When we read The Hat, we learned about hedgehogs.
They've become favorite animals of all of us.

This is a fun novel, not related to Jan Brett, but
set in Denmark so I figured it fit in nicely with all our
learning about Scandinavia. We still haven't finished it,
but it's been a fun read aloud this month.

Only a few of the very many versions of this story/poem we checked out at the library for our final week of Christmas School. I think my fave was Jan Brett tied with Roger Duvoisin (you may know him from Petunia). It was also fun to read a “biography” of Clement C. Moore’s experience of writing the poem. (But as we read in the author’s note from Matt Tavares, did he really write it?!) Cal loved the babies under the tree from Gyo Fujikawa. And Sam picked dinos as his fave.

Christmas school also happened to correspond with the
World Cup, so we spent a lot of lunch hours watching games.
One day Gregg pulled out the LEGO minifigs for a little lesson
demo on offsides.

Ah! Jolabokaflod! Thank you, Iceland, for this amazing
tradition! We spent the evening of Winter Solstice, our
last day of school for the year, snuggled up in our cozy spots,
lots of yummy cookies and popcorn to snack on, and new books
to open and read.

We even had the TV fireplace on to
add ambiance.

We read for two hours and it was simply delightful!
I think we'll keep this tradition around.