{Books We Read}

Our Ready-Made Preschool book was The Christmas Story. We read this story from four different children’s Bibles we have. We read Luke 1:26-38, Luke 2: 1-7, Luke 2: 8-20 and Matthew 2:1-12 from Mommy’s adult Bible. Little Bug wasn’t too excited about this at first, but by the end of the week she was asking me to read more than was planned from my Bible.

We enjoyed two books written by Patricia Polacco, Christmas Tapestry and Gifts of the Heart. Patricia Polacco is one of my favorite children’s authors.

{Bible Time}

I could not be more pleased with our routine of starting the morning with Bible Time. If I accomplish nothing else during our first year of homeschool, I think getting us into the habit of starting our day with a Bible story together on the couch, will be success enough! We all just love this time and I have loved reading a part of the Christmas Story to the girls each morning. We paused our Chronological Study with Moses to study the Christmas Story for the three weeks leading up to Christmas. This week we read about the wise men and how God protected Jesus from King Herod by telling Joseph to flee to Egypt with Mary and Jesus. The morning we went to take our Christmas Family Pictures Daddy read the girls their Bible story before we left.

{Letter of the Week}

Our Letter of the Week was Letter Jj for Baby Jesus! Little Bug had her usual fun with all her letter activities. She glued a jigsaw puzzle to her letter j. She made the Letter Jj with our magnets. She wrote the Letter Jj in the sand and with Do-A-Dot markers. I changed up her ABC Book activity this week and gave her a handful of pictures and had her see which ones started with the j sound. She glued those pictures on her Jj page.

{Nativity}

Every day as we would read more of the Christmas Story, Little Bug got to make that part of the nativity scene! She had so much fun with this! She got to make the stable, Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, a manger, a shepherd and three wise men using materials from Ready-Made Preschool and then an applesauce box (for the stable) and toilet paper rolls to make each person and the manger.

{Crafts We Did}

We made an Emmanuel craft. This craft was so simple to prepare and it was one both girls could basically do on their own minus me hot gluing the popsicle sticks together. I was brave and decided to let them make a star from glitter which they both loved! We talked about the meaning of Emmanuel and that it means “God with us” because God sent Jesus to Earth to be with us.

We did another glitter activity when we made these Popsicle Snowflakes. I glued the popsicle sticks together with the hot glue gun and then the girls put glue on the popsicle sticks and sprinkled glitter on the glue. Using cookie sheets really does help minimize the glitter mess.

Our board at the end of the week:

And, just like that, our first semester of homeschooling is complete! This year is flying by – as I knew it would. Now that we’ve got a whole semester of use under our belts, look for reviews of the curriculum we are using this year coming soon!

- Elaine