How to Add Discipleship to Your Homeschool Holiday Celebrations
We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this review or post, but all opinions are our own.
The Holiday rush is not so far off. It is time to get intentional about planning a few activities to help you celebrate the holidays in meaningful ways. Isn’t it funny how Thanksgiving and Christmas represent such deep, core-values and yet, some years the whole celebration seems to slip right past, and you missed the MAIN thing. I can’t be only me! Have you felt it too? Are you asking, how you can add discipleship to your homeschool holiday celebrations in a connected and meaningful way as a family?
What can We Do to Be Intentional About Discipleship?
Use Great Tools to Help You Reach Your goals
Unit Studies, guides and visual aides help us focus. This helps me remember the MAIN thing through the busyness of holiday prep. Choose the tool that will help you to focus on a specific topic. It might be a character attribute or a specific quality that you want to bring into attention. Being narrow and specific can really help you to keep a clear focus. Even when you are a turkey and two pies deep in feast prep. Add discipleship to your homeschool holiday celebrations with purpose and not add busy work with clear tools.
Gratitude Journal for Your Students
Gratitude is a great topic to focus on around Thanksgiving. Thanks to God a topic central to the story of the early pilgrim’s flight from persecution. Their miraculous survival with the help of Native American allies led to an outpouring of gratitude for generations. Giving thanks is a life skill your young ones will have to try to embrace fully this giving season. Teach about and practicing gratitude now, is a great way to help your children prepare to give and receive with gratitude. We lead. As you know, Thankfulness begins with mom! As you can read in a sweet post about thankfulness from my fellow speaker and blogger, Michell Osborn.
I am speaking about gratitude at the Fall Into Learning Summit this week. You can still grab a VIP PASS to watch the replay if you read this after October 12th. One printable I created for the summit attendees is a Gratitude Journal for your homeschool students. I am so excited to share that I’ve published it to make it available for everyone. In the beautiful, silky-smooth journal, there are 90 pages for your student to practice the simple act of gratefulness.
Five lines each day give them a place to be thankful. There is also a place for their memory work daily, and memorable quote or fact from their reading. I even provide a space for their own memories or thoughts of the day. This journal can serve as a spiritual workbook for the year and could end up being a treasured keepsake for them in the future. The price is affordable, allowing you to add discipleship to your homeschool holiday celebrations. Start every day with the student Gratitude Journal.
Carve Out Your Own Celebrations
Another way to help you share about discipleship in your homeschool is to choose to focus on a holiday you might not normally celebrate with a unit study. This year we are choosing to use the Celebrate Reformation Day Unit Study. Reformation Day, October 31st, 1517, was one of the turning-points in the history of the world. On that Halloween Day, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenburg Church, and with that deed the Protestant Reformation was born. Whether you are Protestant or not, this is a significant event in church history that should be studied.
Why Reformation Day?
Have you seen the stores? Halloween is a huge celebration all around your kids. Giving your child an understanding of the spiritual world they live in is the best way we can prepare them for the world they will meet head-on one day. Darkness does not win on October 31st, nor any other day if you know what the Bible has to say about it.
Unit Studies Help You Get Focused on What You Want to
By using a Unit Study, you can determine how in depth you want to go. Pressed for time? The best part is that with this study from Kerry Beck, you can watch the Reformation Day Workshop to learn all about the history surrounding the event. The unit study includes an Activity Guide, Printables, Reformation Party Ideas, Copy work, Reformation Day reading list and more. You could throw a whole party, or you can watch the workshop with your kids, do some copy work and talk about what it means to question your faith in a sincere way. World changers need to see other world changers in action throughout history.
Unit Studies Can Run Parallel to Your Regular Studies
Want a quick run through Christian History? We are reading The 100 Most Important Events in Christian History this year in our homeschool. Each day, we read an event. The history of the Christian Church, from the fire in Rome in 64 A.D. to Wycliffe overseeing the English translation of the Bible (1380), to the explosion of the Chinese underground church in the 1960 to 70’s. The book is a sweeping brush over the history of the Christian church. It is a great place to get your bearings if you are coming across these events in your homeschool and would like a timeline narrative to help you see the bigger picture.
Unit Studies can Help You Switch the PACE
Fall Unit Studies are a great way to help your slow the pace of your homeschool and give you all more time to pause and celebrate your family, special holidays and the close of summer activities. You can find more Fall Unit Studies to help you fill in your homeschool schedule over the breaks and to fill in when the break is TOO LONG. (I am sure you know what I mean!)
Setting Your PACE this Holiday in Four Steps
A few years ago, I wanted to slow down and be intentional about Christmas. We host my extended family fro Thanksgiving and Christmas. On a regular Friday night, family dinner we run about 20-25 people. Christmas celebrations push out the seams of our house and we are in host mode for weeks. Because of this, we are a natural choice to host. Afterall, we already cook for an army and have three ovens.
With the pace we had set, I realized I was not taking the time to savor the essence of the real meaning of Christmas. I purchased a set of Advent Cards in hopes to plug up my leaky leadership. I know you are shocked to find out that it did not solve the problem. What I needed, was an intentional plan.
How to add discipleship to your homeschool holiday celebrations…really!
I applied the FOUR steps in my PACE plan
I determined what my PRIMARY FOCUS was.
Searching online, I found a beautiful book/advent calendar as my supportive ACTIVITY. We set up the pop up tree which is central to the book by Ann Voskamp, and explained it to the kids.
With a set start date on the CALENDAR, we started off right. Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas was a huge hit. Adding an ornament to the large pop-up tree was something all the kids looked forward to. The fact that the kids were invested and excites helped us keep up with the activity.
When I took time to EVALUATE how well we met our goals, I was so glad that we celebrated more intentionally as a family.
Setting the PACE helped me reach my goals.
What is your GOAL this Holiday season? If you want to add discipleship to your homeschool holiday celebrations in a meaningful way, I hope you found some help in this article.
Looking for more?
Are you interested in learning more about creating Unit Studies for your kids, do you want to help your students work independently and be focused to reach your personal goals?
Check out my Homeschooler’s Guide to Summer Success. It covers all three topics in three 40 minute video teachings and includes a 30 page textbook to support you while you implement the ideas from the workshop.
