Musical Christmas Countdown
9:10 AM
I will tell you a little money saving tip for free and I won't spam your inbox... Ya ready for it...
I DON'T SHOP THE SALES that are sent to me. However, I do collect all the freebie activities, workbooks and eBooks. I download them and save them to print when I am doing a unit on whatever the freebie was for. This is how I came up with the Musical Countdown to Christmas. If you are still with me I will share some great links and how I personalized this idea for my kiddos.
How An Idea Formed
Yesterday we had Library day. For those of you who do not know, we homeschool and once a week we go to the library for new resources and readers the kids want for their personal reading time. We returned 47 books with themes of squirrels, hibernation, Thanksgiving, colonial living, Native American Customs, counting books, pumpkins, easy readers, thankfulness, heavy equipment, Fall, hows to of homeschooling, learning types, teaching reading skills and videos. After two hours of the kiddos playing in the different centers and with other kiddos we left with a very small amount of (12) mostly Christmas themed books and 2 videos.
For December we are focusing on Christmas traditions and customs around the world. Remember those freebies I told ya about. Wink Wink. I digress. While at the library looking for books to go with that unit, I found Christmas songs that were written in book format. I had not yet intended to use them as a learning tool. I thought they were cute.
Now for the freebies
So one of the great freebies I received was a Christmas Carol Advent Calendar printable from Mama Smiles. Her idea is to share a Christmas song everyday during a quiet time the whole family is together such as during meals. I loved this idea and as I started reading some of the song titles I remembered the books of songs I got the day prior. Then I thought "how fun would it be to make the songs into mini lessons!"
I found cursive copywork from Teach Me Joy. My 7 year old is excited about these printables. He wants to learn cursive and these carol verses are great to get him started. From Whychristmas I found a couple of stories of carols and a ton of other great resources. Ambleside has a great resources on Christmas carols. Homeschool Giveaways is one of my go to gems. They have a printable, eBook or unit on just about everything. The following links are from this great site; free resources and printables for studying popular hymns, Christmas carols unit studies, Christmas hymns unit study series. Finally to include printables for my preschooler; I went to my other gem of resources site, 3 Dinosaurs for Christmas printables.
Putting It Together
I selected the songs we are going to listen to and edited a few titles on the Christmas Carol Advent Calendar printable. I went to the sites above and found the needed resources for each song and made a YouTube playlist for quick reference. Then put it all together in a cute decorated basket with Christmas light necklaces, jingle bell bracelets and song books.
What do you think of a Musical Christmas Countdown? What fun ways does your family countdown to Christmas? Share with us below.
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