Embracing New Family Traditions in Homeschooling

Thanksgiving is in a couple of weeks and that means Advent starts soon after… where oh where does time go?

If you’ve been around my blog for long then you probably know that I try to do Advent studies with our Homeschool in place of our regular homeschool activities… this year is no different. I really want my family to be able to FOCUS on the REAL REASON BEHIND THE SEASON… not just the HOLLYWOOD VERSION. This gives us time to enjoy our family and helps to eliminate some of the stress from trying to get it all done.

We’ve been making some gradual changes in our home that may or not be for you. We have cut back on the number of gifts that we give and we try to be more intentional on the gifts we give. Often we will purchase ‘experience’ gifts that we can enjoy together as a family.

Free Printables for Holiday Shopping plus some tips for buying for special needs kiddos!

We also have different activities that we do every year like our POLAR EXPRESS PARTY which gives the kids a chance to show off some of the skills we’ve been working on using real-life activities. Below are some of the books that I recently ordered for our Advent Activities… some of these may actually end up incorporated into our Polar Express Party but not sure exactly how yet. We have some links to FREE materials further down in the post.

Free Printable Shopping Guide – Makes Christmas Shopping So Much Easier!

I’ve really been trying to focus on slowing down in general and enjoying every day as much as I can. I’ve incorporated some daily audio devotionals… the App store on my phone has plenty to choose from so hopefully I’ll be able to post about them soon but I encourage you to check and see what you may have available to you.

Preparing for Christmas… St. Nicholas, Gifts in a Jar, and so much more!

I am posting links to all of these things so I don’t forget and so I can easily direct people to a post when I get asked about things. I hope that these might help make someone else’s life a little stressful.

I ordered these books from Amazon:**

Advent Calendar Puzzle Book

Prepare Him Room: 28 Ways to Embrace the Spirit of Christmas: An Advent Devotional

**Yes, those are Affiliate links and we will earn a small commission if you purchase through those links.

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Friendly Reminder – Holiday Planning

I also purchased this Christmas School Study from RAR. I am pretty excited to give this a try and it might help inspire me to make some new unit studies of my own… fingers crossed as I know I still need to finish up our Little House on the Prairie Series.

I couldn’t find the ‘Little Christmas Carol’ on AMAZON right now but WALMART.COM did have it in stock or you may be able to check it out at your local library along with the other suggested books… you could always use those as read-alouds and have independent discussions without a study guide.

Don’t worry if you can’t purchase these items right now… times are tough and we were just fortunate to have a little extra to buy these right now. I will list some of the FREE activities that I’ve found and used in the past below as well as adding some links to older posts in this post.