We love Christmas. 2nd part 2018-12-01.

We love traditions and keep on inventing new ones all the time. Particularly Christmas is a star of tradition and celebration. We celebrate Christmas all during December. Today, on the 1st of December, we started out with putting up our homemade Christmas Calender – 4 Santas holding bags with space for surprises. This year our youngest child had already written a letter to Santa 4 months ago, so he put that in the bag to get to Santa.

Our oldest daughter has been writing on a Christmas Story for the past month. A story with a chapter for each day until Christmas. So she had put that into her Santa bag.

The Santa dolls in the bags are for them to play with. They got them when they were really small and have made clothes and things for them during the years.

In the evening I prepare songbooks and today, a list to complete with the children tomorrow, listing and arranging the things they wish to do in December.

All the kids take turns on lighting the candle.

The kids open their presents one after each other. Afterwoods all children choose a song and we all join in.

Our oldest daughter has this year written a Christmas Calender, where she reads a chapter aloud for all of us every day up to Christmas.

Every evening my job is to reply to letters to Santa. It can be returned with corrections in spelling and new questions they then will reply to and practise their spelling and vocabulary.

This year I had also bought school tickets to the Royal Ballet, where we saw “Alice in Wonderland” together with a lot of other Home School friends in the afternoon.

We also choose 2 Christmas Calender series each year, and watch them before or after breakfast.

How do you learn to read?

When we first started out homeschooling, we, talked about how to teach the children to read. There was so many methods, but one in particular stood out. A new company, Alkalær had just published a series of books, which worked with the idea, that all children can learn to read using phonics. Children are taught to read letters or groups of letters by saying the sound(s) they represent. Children can then start to read words by blending the sounds together to make a word. Alkalær had at that time an offer of a series of their books and we invested in that package. At first our oldest child was not that interested, but after a few months she started with them and soon learned to read phonic words. All the books were also in majuscule, which really made it easier for the very young children to focus on the reading and not struggling with different versions of minuscule. The children found the layout and stories very funny and crazy. As you can see on the film below our younger kids also learned to read through those books. At the moment our youngest child is also enjoying the system and we have invested in another new book from Alkalær “Læs nu løs” and a song book of the same title. There was also a song book in the first set we bought, and I have no idea how many times we have danced all together or in own space to those books. They are really wonderful. Reading is the beginning of all self learning. When you can read, you can read a math exercise and look up how to understand it. You can read your way to all the other subjects.