December is my absolute favourite month for so many reasons. I love all of the anticipation leading up to Christmas. I love the colder weather and the snow. I love the cozy fires and the lights and the crafts and the early morning walks on the crunching snow.
Last year in our house we tried something a little different for the month of December. We made some math goals for all of the kids and told them that if they could all meet those goals by the end of November, that we would shut down everything else for our lessons except for reading for the month of December. It went SO well that we decided to do the same thing again this year. All of the kids were excited to work through their math lessons and every single one of them either met or exceeded their goals ahead of time. You seriously have no idea what a blessing it is to have an entire month set aside where we can just rest and be together as a family, pouring into our ever-growing book stack without the pressure or worry of planning lessons.
This week we continued to read through Archimedes and the Door of Science, The Magicians Nephew, and Psalms 1 – Psalms 6. Each kid is also allowed to pick a book each day to add to our reading time. Some of the books we read were several of the Fancy Nancy Books, The Worlds Greatest Submarines, The Salamander Room and a few chapters of Sink and Destroy – The Battle of the Atlantic. (My boys both love anything to do with war, especially WWII). To finish up our Fancy Nancy Aspiring Artist Study that we worked on the previous 2 weeks, we also visited the Remai Modern Art Museum in Saskatoon.
On Friday, we took the morning off of reading (with the exception of The Magicians Nephew which my kids barely let me put down) and focused rather on getting our house back in order for the weekend. Often, we do the bulk of our chores on Saturday, but I was feeling like the house needed some extra attention with all of the extra Christmas activities coming up. Later in the afternoon Gracia went busking at Shoppers Drugmart to raise money for the Children’s Crisis Nursery in Saskatoon. All of the piano students did such an amazing job and were able to raise nearly $600.00. She has such an amazing piano teacher and we feel blessed to have her in our lives.
It is supposed to snow here tonight so I think we will probably put on a Christmas movie tonight and relax with the kids!
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