Weekly Wrap-up ~ The 12 Days of Christmas

We are now into the 12 Days of Christmas, and we are feeling the festivities. I was very intentional this year to have the kids help me come up with Advent activities so that we could enjoy some aspect of Christmas each day of December.

This week we drove through the Christmas in the Park light display in our town while drinking hot cocoa, watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas", studied about and celebrated Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Lucy, made gingerbread men, and attended our local high school's Christmas program.

We are wrapping up a few things with regular schooling. We read all but a few of the final chapters of Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians series) and The Green Ember, which yesterday was free on Kindle. It might still be today, so check it out! We will finish both those books early next week.

We are finishing Volume 2 of IEW's Fix-it Grammar Robin Hood. Only one more week of lessons.

And we finished the last lesson in Scienceandmath.com's Pre-Algebra Volume 1. We also played a new favorite game, Timeline.

The kids continued to read out of their personal books. Brynne is still in the throes of the Warriors series by Erin Hunter is is currently reading The Forgotten Warrior from the Omen of the Stars set. Eli is reading Watership Down.

Eli went to speech therapy this week. Brynne had a basketball game where she was high-point scorer for her team. She also severely jammed two of her fingers. Thankfully they are quickly on the mend.

We hosted our enrichment class yesterday. The girls wrote persuasive letters to Santa trying to convince him to hire their reindeers (ones they drew last week with our directed drawing lesson) new reindeer for his sleigh on Christmas Eve. They also did a Rudolph Mad Lib. The boys watched another episode of Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego and traveled to Vinci, Italy, and Antarctica.

Finally, we started volunteering this week delivering lunch to 25 senior citizens in our town. Our senior citizen center delivers lunch for each day of the week. We heard from a friend that they were needing a new driver on Tuesdays, so the kids and I decided it was a job we would like to do.

We only have 3 more days of school before we take an extended Christmas break. We are going to take off until February 6th. That's one way to eliminate the February slump! We will be refreshed and ready for some routine by then. At least I will be!

And how about if we end this post with a little bit of adorableness? Bennett is just a week shy of turning 4 months old. He is such a JOY, the happiest baby I have ever been around. And isn't he cute? His mama tried him out in his wrap facing forward last night to make grocery shopping a little easier. He's a Mister Nosey-body so he will love being about to look around and flirt with whoever is nearby. I think he's ready! He reminds me of that photo you see with the baby duck taped to the wall.

2016-2017 School Hours Logged: 479.5 hours, including 84.5 hours outside home. Plus Summer Hours Logged: 141.5 hours, including 54 hours outside home.