Christmas Season

I LOVE Christmas!  I love the fun and the wonder and treats, and I love being able to celebrate it now with kids!  We kept school time pretty flexible this month and tried to make time for some special things, and for me, I wanted to really make sure our focus was on the birth of Jesus and trying not to cram the time full of too many activities to distract us from that!  I also wanted to make sure that we enjoyed the time and had fun with it!

We tried to play quite a few games.  The boys enjoyed doing some roll and color games.  Isaiah takes them very seriously, and Ezekiel imitates what he thinks is happening.  It took him awhile to actually ROLL the die.  Mostly, he would just bang it on the table and few times and then let go and smile.

It wasn't specifically Christmas-focused, but I pulled out the shower curtain I had brought along on which I had written all the letters of the alphabet, and we tossed bean bags.  Sometimes I called out a letter, and Isaiah tried to hit that letter with a beanbag; sometimes we just tossed the beanbags and then called out the letters they hit.

Eventually, it turned into wrestling, as do many, many things in a boy house! :)

I cut out light bulb shapes in a variety of colors and asked Isaiah to tell me the letters of his name, which I then wrote, one on each paper.  Then, I mixed them up and asked him to arrange them in order to string together and hang on the wall.

Ezekiel contributed to his letters as well.

Isaiah worked on this coloring book from 3Dinosaurs.com.  It had a shepherd on each page and a direction with a color word.  It took several days because he took it very seriously to make his nice book, so we just did a few each day, and he was really pleased once he finished it.

Actually, one of the first things we did was to hang up these ABC ornaments from 1+1+1=1.  I cut them apart, and then Isaiah hung them on the wall in order, while Zeke kept pointing to them and starting to sing, so we sang the ABC's quite a few times.  We also used several other of the Christmas printables from this site.

I am learning to be more flexible and allow moments like these to just happen, as they are so incredible when they do.  They just started "reading" books and laughing together!  Love these times! 

The boys have been begging to start some school time again since we've taken a break for a couple weeks from anything structured over Christmas!  I can't even express how much I love their enthusiasm for all of this!