5 Home School Activities for Christmas

Are you looking for school activities for Christmas to use for homeschooling or your classroom? Christmas is a busy time of year and keeping kids focused can be a bit difficult.

Let’s use Christmas as your homeschool. Take a break from your regular academics and center all your school work on Christmas. From letter writing in But … when you make learning fun with Christmas activities you can help keep them focused just a bit longer. Check out these fun homeschool activities for Christmas. 

Home School Activities for Christmas

Letter Writing & Christmas Language Arts

During our homeschool years, I used our annual Christmas letter as Language Arts. Each child wrote a paragraph about their past year, using good grammar, correct spelling and punctuation. They even had to dress up their paragraph to be more interesting.

You might also use Advent & Christmas words for Spelling. Have your children copy Christmas carols for copywork. Read Christmas books to read aloud as narration.

Explore Traditions with Christmas Around the World

When I taught in a classroom, we always studied Christmas around the world during December. Once I started homeschooling, I continued with these cultural studies, learning all about different countries’ traditions.

Pick a random place on a map or globe. Use Google to learn about a Christmas tradition from that place. If you have the space to work you can even opt to make a simple treat from the place you are learning. Some of our favorites were St Lucia Buns from Sweden. We also celebrated St Nicholas Day.

What traditions could your children discover when they study other countries’ celebrations.

Decorate Christmas Cookies

Baking and decorating Christmas cookies is a tradition passed down through our family, for several generations. Even as adults, my children made cut-out cookies and decorated them.

I used it as a great activity to learn more about Math (fractions, double recipe), Science (physical or chemical changes), Budgeting (shopping on a budget) and more.

To take these school activities for Christmas a step further, you could bake and decorate cookies to give to your neighbors or take to an old folks home.

Book Advent

As you countdown to Christmas in your homeschool, a book advent calendar is a fun way to work on literacy with your kids. Wrap up enough books to get you from the first day to the last and have a child pick the book you all enjoy each day. If you use chapter books, wrap one for each week of Advent, for a total of for books.

You might choose from our best Christmas books for kids. Each day that you read aloud, let your children narrate to you what they heard from the story that day.

You can even build lesson plans around each book and simply have them ready to go before you start the adventure. As each book is chosen, you’ll already have a simple plan of follow up activities. This offers excitement that is sure to please. 

Random Acts of Kindness

Let’s use this time of year to reach our kid in being loving and kind to others. One great way to do this is to work together to create and complete a list of random acts of kindness. As a group, brainstorm random acts of kindness, everyone can do. These should be things that can be completed during the regular school time and should not require lots of money. 

Turn your list into a fun activity. This can be done by making a bingo card, putting them on pieces of paper to randomly choose an activity to complete.

Another fun activity is to write each random act of kindness on a popsicle stick. Colored sticks make it even more fun. Decorate a jar or candle holder. Place all the popsicle sticks in the jar. Each day or each week, choose one stick and read which random act of kindness you’ll do at that time.

Home School Activities with a Christmas Unit Study

Before I close . . .

One of the best pieces of advice I received the first year I homeschooled was to take a break during December. A friend of mine who had kids the same ages, but had homeschooled since Kindergarten, told me she “quits” formal homeschooling.

What you might say? Quit homeschooling for a month.

Well, not really!

From this piece of advice, our family began a family Christmas tradition of integrating Christmas and Advent into our homeschooling.

To get more ideas as you integrate Christmas into your homeschool…to encourage a love of learning during the holidays, I’m offering for a limited time, my Christmas Unit Study. You’ll get practical and easy ideas in Christmas Writing, Christmas Math, Reading, History, Science Experiments and much more.

Enter your name & email below and we’ll send it to you for free through the next few weeks. Then, it goes back up to $9.97

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