holidays

The Top Five–Holidays

Since tomorrow is one of my favorite holidays, I thought I’d share a holiday-themed “Top Five” list!

  • Christmas–Shocking, right? If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you know that this is my very favorite of the holidays….an over-the-top birthday party for Jesus! From Advent through Epiphany, the celebration doesn’t stop. Extra time at church, fun family traditions, special music and movies, commemoration days to celebrate, decorations, gift-giving, cooking and baking galore…what’s not to love?
  • Easter–Easter is the highlight of the church year, and that’s why I love it so much…all the time spent at church, especially during Holy Week, and Easter Sunday itself. I know there was a time we didn’t get to go to two church services, plus enjoy breakfast at church on Easter, but I really can’t remember it, and I don’t want it any other way. Plus, there’s a special family dinner to cap it all off!
  • St. Patrick’s Day–I’m not even Irish, but I love this holiday. I love that its roots come from church tradition, I love decorating in green and shamrocks, I love our special family traditions that we enjoy on this day every year (including school traditions), and I love the special foods we eat on this holiday.
  • Thanksgiving–This is a holiday that’s a lot of work for one day, but we’ve still built so many special family traditions around it that I can’t help but love it. From our “Thankful Tree” and special school unit throughout November, to the seven pies I bake every Thanksgiving Eve, to the pie for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving, plus the Christmas Lego building, turkey soup making, and town tree-lighting that same day…it’s just a fantastically fun family day(s)!
  • Independence Day–And, finally, the holiday that inspired this post…the birthday of our country! I love the patriotic songs (the Fourth of July and Christmas always mean time for the Boston Pops Orchestra!), the red, white, & blue everywhere, the parades and fireworks, and, again, the special foods I make for our family’s celebration. Oh, and the watching of Holiday Inn (firecracker dance, anyone?), and Yankee Doodle Dandy every year on the fourth…it’s so much fun!

What are your family’s favorite holidays?

Lesson Planning

My love for Sonlight is two-sided, I’ve discovered.  First of all, and most obviously, I love their curriculum because I don’t have to worry about writing lesson plans.  Back in my early childhood ed. days at CURF (am I still allowed to call it that?  Or do I have to go with the somewhat irritating, and, in my opinion, horribly inaccurate, CUC?), and even into my DCE studies (you’d be surprised how many lesson plans DCEs in training have to write!) I hated writing lesson plans, unless it was a topic that I was really interested in or passionate about.  I just dreaded sitting down and putting in the time and effort (but mostly the time!) it took to make a good lesson.  Now, if I taught full-time, or even if I was still working as a DCE, and writing my own Bible studies, I’m sure I would have gotten better, or at least more efficient at it, but still…

As it is, though, I’m glad I don’t have that task to worry about!  Sonlight has provided me with fantastic (in my opinion, at least) lesson plans for all my subjects.  I just review what we’re going to be doing the week before we do it, and I’m ready to go!  Such a burden lifted…I doubt I’d make it as a homeschooling mom if I had to write all my own lessons (or at least I wouldn’t be doing a very good job of it!).

But, the flip-side of that is this–because I’m not bogged down with daily lesson plans for things like history, math, and language arts, I can use my time to create lessons for the extra stuff I actually want to do.  Like my Olympics unit, which I basically put together by myself, that we did before school started.  Fun holidays, extra topics we want to study, more in-depth religion (and doctrine, if you will–gotta raise those little Lutherans right!), those things I actually enjoy planning lessons for.  Yeah, they’re probably not formatted “correctly,” and I’m sure I’m not covering all the things I’m supposed to.  But I don’t have to worry about that, because I have 36 weeks of good, solid lesson plans for all the subjects prepared for me, and anything else I add to that is just icing on the cake (good thing we’re inclined toward year-round schooling, because I have a feeling I’m going to be tacking on a month or more of my own lessons!).

Between now and the end of the year, I have a special one-day unit on the Reformation planned (another fantastic thing about Sonlight–because of the way the curriculum is organized, it’s super easy to compress five days worth of lessons into four if you want to or need to–as a matter of fact, if I understand it correctly, I’ll have the option of having four or five days worth of curriculum starting next year.  Still planning on using the full five, but it’s nice to have the option…), a three-day Thanksgiving unit (along with an extra five days of Thanksgiving readers in place of our normal Little House readers the week before Thanksgiving), and a five to ten day Christmas unit.  (What can I say?  I love Christmas, and I have a ton of ideas involving the history of Christmas celebrations, world cultures, and, of course, the birth of Christ. And no Santa!  Another plus to homeschooling!)

So, I can love Sonlight both because I don’t have to plan lessons, and because, since they have prepared the lessons for me, I have extra time and I get to plan the fun stuff.  The best of both worlds–I love it!