Tag: unit study

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Teach Science through Picture Books in Your Homeschool

I love to teach science with picture books in our homeschool. The thing about picture books is they’re great for every age. From toddler, to teenager, to me – the adult! We can learn so much through one book.

Over the last couple of years I find myself moving further and further away from textbooks and workbooks in multiple subjects and focusing more on literature-based learning. It has been such an engaging and memorable way to learn.

There’s something about a science textbook where every time I open up to start the lesson, I dread reading it out loud. It’s like I already know it will be hard to keep their attention the whole time. This year I bought a science text for my older girls that they were taking in our co-op and thought we could just use it as a family study since it was made for elementary ages…I couldn’t do it!

The thought of reading it to my youngest ones (ages 5 and 6) was overwhelming. I’ve been thinking a lot about my youngest two and how fun these elementary years can be – so much wonder and curiosity and play through learning. I want to take advantage of these years and enjoy what we are reading. This is what led me to create my newest literature-based curriculum – Science Through Picture Books.

In this blog post I’ll share a little more about what it is and how it works. I’ll let you know my plans as I work on piecing units together over the next couple years to create it for my own family. Picture books have brought so much joy to our homeschool, and I hope it can do the same for you.

This post contains affiliate links. If you follow one of my links I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my blog!

An Overview of Science Through Picture Books

Science Through Picture Books was created as a family study for your children ages kindergarten through fifth grade. It will be made up of multiple units, and each unit will contain a list of twelve books.

These twelve books can be read at any pace you like. Read one per week and finish the unit in twelve weeks OR two per week and finish the unit in six weeks. Read three per week and finish in four weeks…and so on!

You have the choice to read as many as you’d like throughout your week, making the unit fit into your family schedule as you desire.

Each book is paired with an optional video. These are short videos to enrich the lesson from the stories and can provide more visuals and discussion opportunities with your children.

As you read these books, I will guide you in introducing and discussing the stories with your children. (See example in photo above) For each book, I give you notes on reading it aloud, a script for introducing it to your kids, and optional discussion questions and narration prompts.

Science note booking is also an option. I will teach and encourage you to practice narration as you read this books. The unit will list multiple ways to keep record of your science notebooks in order to differentiate your note booking for different ages and skill levels.

Finally, I provide you with a list of enrichment activities that you have the option to add to your studies. The activities range in prep and difficulty containing super simple ideas or more complex projects that take a little more time.

What is a Lesson Like in Science Through Picture Books?

Picture this: Gather at the table, snuggle up on your couch, or lay out a blanket in the grass. Read a book and have your children narrate to you. It’s that simple. If you’re not familiar with narration, I’ll guide you through all of that in this guide. 

Some of you may like to go a little further, and that’s encouraged if it brings you joy! You’ll see in the section above all of the additional videos and activities that are included in this unit. The point is, you can make this as simple or as complex as you’d like.

Unit Topics – Meeting the Standards

As a homeschooling mom, I try not to focus so much on the standards, but at the same time I know that some may feel peace of mind knowing they are following a certain standard as they teach their child. So, in this section, I hope to do my best to meet both sides in the middle.

As I researched science standards while developing this curriculum, I realized that they are not the same across the country. Common Core standards exist, focusing on literacy through science in grades K-5, which is great, because you’ll get plenty of that through these books!

Some states have their own unique science standards while others have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, released in 2013. (NGSS)

My hope is to provide a variety of science units for families to choose from to help build a foundation of knowledge in the subject. These units will focus on three out of the four disciplinary core ideas listed in the NGSS: physical sciences, life sciences, and earth and space sciences.

These categories will guide me as I choose themes for the different units. The standards will not be stated in these units, because my intention is to make this a family study, which would be an extensive list covering multiple grade levels. However, if you’re curious about what these standards are, I encourage you to do your own research on their website which provides free, downloadable lists of the standards for each grade. 

One thing you may notice is the majority of the standards can be met through these books and your discussion. Reading the standards can feel very “official” or possibly overwhelming, but remember that the goal of these elementary years is to build a foundation – the NGSS will tell you the same thing! We aren’t trying to reach a mastery of topics. We are encouraging curiosity and igniting their desire to learn even more!

Look-Through the Curriculum

Want to see inside one of these units? I know sometimes that can help get a better idea of what a specific curriculum is all about. Head to my YouTube channel to learn more about this and see inside the unit guide.

Watch the Video Here.

Future Units

These units will be published as I complete them with my own children. I have a goal to complete four this year. We may or may not get to more than that. Here’s what you can expect this year:

Each unit will follow the same pattern as I mentioned above in the overview.

Choosing Books

I work really hard to research and read tons of books for these units. I enjoy it very much as I get to know authors and illustrators while increasing my knowledge on different topics.

There are hundreds of books on these topics. However, my goal is not to provide you with tons and tons of books. I hope to give you a simplified, streamlined list in order to help you build a foundation of science knowledge with your kids.

A beautiful, informative picture book always engages my children and me. Some people might refer to these as living books. These are the books that draw your attention and make you eager to listen and learn. It never fails when I read a great picture book with my kids, we are wanting to read more! It’s like it can spark a certain curiosity to dig deeper. 

That’s exactly what science should be in these elementary years. We want to spark our children’s curiosity to learn more about the world and increase their desire to explore and experiment and even question ideas. All of this will develop their knowledge of science topics as well as their critical thinking skills. 

When it comes to collecting these books for your family, the library is such a great way to do that. With the list of books in hand, you can easily put books on hold as you prepare for the unit! It’s such an inexpensive way to learn science with your kids.

How to Use these Units

In my own home, I use these units as our whole science curriculum. I don’t find it necessary to add anything else. Even as I research standards, I am confident that the content and the discussions provide my children with an excellent foundation in science knowledge.

You do have other options to consider:

  • As stated above, use this on its own for your homeschool science curriculum. More units coming soon!
  • Use the book list as a supplemental resource to enhance a science textbook you plan to work through.
  • Let the booklist be your guide as you create your own unit study stretching across multiple subject areas. 

However you decide to use it, I can promise you one thing – You’re going to love these books! 

Stay in-the-know About Releases

If you’re not on my email list already, you’ll want to join now, because that’s where I will announce new releases. Each time I publish a unit, I’ll send out an announcement with a link. I know joining email lists can be frustrating at times, but it’s the best way to communicate with you all.

Emails are sent to announce product releases, sales, and to share the videos I make on YouTube. I hope you’ll connect with me there!

Interested in more Literature-Based Studies??

American History through Picture Books – Work through the timeline of history, one picture book at a time.

DIY Language Arts Novel Guides – Make LA a family study with these novels! No more workbook.

DIY Language Arts Picture Book Studies (K-2nd) – Practice LA skills through books you know and love.

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Knights and Castles – Middle Ages Mini Unit

coat of arms

We are beginning to study the middle ages in our homeschool, and I’ve decided to make it into a bunch of different mini-units. Our first one will focus on knights and castles.

Read further for all the books we read as well as the activities we did, but come back soon and check out our other middle ages units as well. I will be posting them on the blog as we complete them!

This post contains affiliate links. If you follow one of my links I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my blog!

the door in the wall

Read Aloud Novel

“The Door in the Wall” by Marguerite de Angeli takes place in the middle ages. It follows the story of a young boy who is destined to become a page but is suddenly ill and unable to fulfill his duty. A monk comes to his aid and encourages him to learn new things and work on becoming stronger. His hard work will soon pay off as he will play an important role in protecting the castle.

This book came highly recommended (from many other homeschool mamas online) as a historical fiction novel to read while studying the middle ages. The language can be tricky to understand, and by reading it aloud, I was able to explain what many different things meant. (I also learned some things myself!)

The book is 121 pages and contains 10 chapters, most of which we were able to read in one sitting. The last two chapters were much longer and took us a couple of days to get through.

I also love the message and theme that surrounded the story. Hard work and perseverance can really pay off. When one opportunity ends, another one might come along. You may think about a modern day phrase, “When one door closes, another opens”. All of these ideas brought on great discussion with my kids.

We all enjoyed this book so much. Although we used it to study history, we also used it for my oldest daughter’s language arts lessons. (Read about that here)

More Books

I love using the library as our main source for books, and for this unit, I even visited a local used bookstore. That may get dangerous in the future. I could’ve bought so much! I found tons of good reads and I’ll share the best ones here. You can also check out my YouTube video where I share a peak inside of the books as well.

coat of arms

Coat of Arms

Almost every book we read about knights talked about a coat of arms. Knights would decorate their shields in a way to represent who they were. This was a fun activity to express who we are and decorate our own pretend shields.

You could definitely cut cardboard and paint if you wanted to go all out. We just used white paper! I cut the papers into a shape of a shield and I offered a couple of options. Decorate the whole shield or divide it into 2-4 pieces and add different designs to each piece. They each did something different, but I loved seeing what they chose to add to their shield.

I had them tell me about their designs and what it meant to them so I could write it on the back. It’s a great piece of art for their portfolios.

cardboard castles

Create Castle and Drawbridge

This activity and the two following activities were completed after reading portions of “Castle” by David Macaulay. This book seemed a little intimidating to me because it’s quite long, but it was highly recommended. It turned out to be absolutely wonderful and we learned so much! It did take about 3 days to get through it all.

We created a castle using a cardboard box from our pantry. This blog post breaks down the entire process. Since I have younger ones, I did a little bit of prep to help the activity run smoother. By the time we were ready to start, I already had the boxes shaped.

I had my two oldest each decorate their own castle. I will admit that once it was time to create the drawbridge, I could only help one at a time. If you had older kids, it may be fun to hand them the supplies and say – how can you make this work?

With my two (ages 6 and 8), we talked about it as we went, and I had to do a lot of the work so that the drawbridge would do what it was supposed to. Even still, they loved the finished product and immediately got their Barbies out to start acting out a castle attack. It was pretty cute to watch, and such a fun way to assess what they’ve been learning – through play! I love it!

Castle Drawing and Narration

Before we read our Castle story one morning, I found a video that taught my girls how to draw a castle. Now, we love Art for Kids Hub, but their castle drawing could only be watched if you pay for a subscription on their website.

So, we did something crazy and decided to just draw the Ice Castle from their YouTube channel. I encouraged my girls to decorate it like the castles we have been reading about. My oldest did just that and kept the snow. My other two girls just went full blown Frozen and kept the ice castle.

Either way, it was still fun and I decided to use their pictures as a visual for their narration of what we read that morning. I wrote something for my two oldest girls and kept it in our yearly portfolio. I love how it turned out.

Build-A-Castle Rotation

Just one more day of reading this book (“Castle”), and I wanted something fun to finish it off. We have a few open-ended toys at our house, so I chose four different bins full of blocks to get us started.

I set out four blankets for our morning time and put a bin on each blanket. We had Magnatiles, Mega Blocks , Duplo Legos, and wooden blocks. I told each of my kids that I would set a timer for five minutes and they’d have to build a castle out of that specific toy.

At the end of the timer, no matter if they finished or not, they would rotate to the next blanket and build another castle. They thought this was the coolest. It really broke up the time well! They made all kinds of castles and it was the perfect way to finish off the book while keeping hands busy and ears listening. It was also neat to see their creativity and became a beautiful way to assess their understanding!

Still on My Wishlist

I always like to have a few ideas in my head of what I want to do for our unit studies. I’ll usually make a board on Pinterest (See my middle ages board). The thing is, I don’t always get to every single one. That’s because they are mostly enrichment! And if it adds more stress to complete it, then I put it off for another time.

I love homeschooling with this philosophy because I don’t feel pressured to check a bunch of things off. We still learn so much through our readings! The next couple of activities are ones I wanted to do but didn’t quite get to during our unit. However, they’re too cute not to share! I’ll be saving them for a rainy day, but I hope they might inspire you if you’re studying the middle ages!

Sir Cumference

The Sir Cumference series is so much fun. They are picture books based in the medieval times that teach math concepts through stories.

We found ours at the library. I checked out four of them and we simply read them together before bedtime for a few nights in a row. My kids loved them!

Although we didn’t do an activity to go along with it. I kept thinking how fun it would be to do a simple graphing idea with some candy or cookies, just like in the “Roundabout Battle” story. Check out this candy bar graph for an idea of what I mean. You can also see this photo of an M&M pie chart for another type of graph the book used.

These are such simple ways to bring the book to life and experience the graph in our own hands instead of just the story.

Armor of God

One of the books that we read had a Christian message, and it was called “The Brave Young Knight”. The book was great alone, but I had this idea to do a little armor of God study to go along with it.

You can find the armor of God in the bible in Ephesians 6:10-20. Once we read about it in scripture, I wanted to create a fun, easy knight using aluminum foil shapes. This link will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

As we review the armor of God, I hoped to cut the different pieces of the armor out of the foil, glue it on construction paper and label it. I just feel like this could be such a fun way to link our study of knights to what we learn in scripture. It’s also a great visual to help us memorize the verses.

Movies/Shows

We have a family movie night on the weekends, and I love when I can match it up to what we are learning. During this unit, we watched a couple of movies that were related to knights and castles.

First, was The Sword in the Stone. This is an old Disney film that follows the adventures of a young boy who wants to be a knight. It is very magical, but it does take place in the time period. Since I have kids ages 2-8, it was a great one that we could all enjoy.

Another weekend, we let the bigger kids watch A Knight’s Tale. Now, this one is rated PG-13 and it took a little editing on our part.

First, we had to talk with the kids about the language. We also had to be prepared to skip a love scene in the film. The only other thing was one of the first scenes. You see a man’s butt and there’s also a visual of someone hanging in the background. Beyond those few parts, the rest of the film was fantastic!

I highly suggest you read through the Common Sense Media page, and as always, choose what you think is best for your family. Everyone has a preference for movies, and as parents we get the privilege to choose what is shown in our home. In my opinion, it was worth the watch, even though we skipped a small bit. The film portrays that time period so well. You can really see the different classes of people as well as things like jousting and coats of arms, all of which we discussed together the weeks before.

More Unit Studies

Come back soon for more unit studies related to the middle ages. If you liked looking through these ideas or if you try one at home, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

We’ve been doing unit studies like this all year and I have most of them on the blog. I’ll link some of them below if you’d like check them out!

Ancient Egypt

Weather

Space

Ancient China

Vikings

Thanksgiving

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Vikings – Homeschool Unit Study

It’s time to learn about Vikings in our homeschool! I’m so pumped because I don’t know much about them (HA!) That doesn’t scare me! It makes it all the more exciting doing it with the kids. We will be learning so much together, and I’m thrilled! So, as we go through our unit, I’ll be writing this blog post. I hope to share the books we are reading for our unit study as well as the different activities we do.

This post contains affiliate links. If you follow one of my links I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my blog!

Library Haul

My first step in any unit study is to collect books from the library. I’ve shared this before, but my main strategy is to just head to the non-fiction section and start putting books in my bag.

This time around I did have a few books I put on hold just in case. So, I grabbed those first and the rest were a surprise.

I’m so excited! For this unit I had some time to make a YouTube video sharing all the books we used. Check that video out here.

Below are just a few of the books that we got and loved for our unit. The first three were great to read front to back as a fun read aloud. The rest are good reference books that we used to research other topics, like geography, art, clothing, and more.

planning a unit

Planning

Next, it’s my turn to do the studying. I like to just flip through the library books and skim through the pages. The pictures and text inspire me before I start hunting for different activities on Pinterest. This also helps me know which books will be easy to read to my kids and which ones might just be a good reference book on our shelf.

As I looked through each book, I made a note of some focus topics that the book discussed: ships, food, Viking men and women, recipes, clothing…anything.

Next, I headed to Pinterest and looked for some inspiration of any topics that I knew would interest me or my kids. I’ve saved all of my pins in one board called “Vikings” if you’d like to take a look.

Read Alouds

We always do our read aloud novels before bed time. This has been so great for us. We read so much more, my kids can wind down, and most of the time it’s quieter than our morning time.

For this unit, I’m trying something new and reading TWO books at bedtime. One is nonfiction – “Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Vikings”. The other is a fictional novel – “Imagination Station: Voyage with the Vikings”

In addition to that, each of my bigger kids (8 yrs and 6 yrs) listened to an audio book separately during their quiet time. Through our library app (Libby) we checked out “Magic Treehouse: Viking Ships at Sunrise” The book is only about 40 minutes long so they were each able to listen to it in one day and had a chance to exchange what their favorite part was.

These three books alone will teach my kids and I so much. Having this as the backbone to our unit will help us learn all sorts of information, but it also gives me confidence that I don’t need a ton of extras. We will be soaking in facts and fun through books!

Extra Activities

Now is the part where I get to share the fun, “extra” things we did for our unit. I personally think reading together is great and the following things aren’t necessary to learn. However, it brings me joy planning them and my children LOVE them. So, we continue to add a few fun things here and there in our units. I hope sharing them with you may inspire your family, as well!

geography activity

Geography

The Vikings lived mostly in Scandinavia, but they sailed to many different countries. I felt like this was a great opportunity to talk about our seven continents.

First, I found a free printable online that was blank, black and white, and would allow us to label the continents. Once we did that we colored each continent a different color.

I also shared a couple of videos online that talked about the different continents and what you may find there. One is shorter, animated, and silly. The other is a little longer, has real pictures, and LOTS of facts. Both were great to watch!

We were also able to use a few of our library books. Almost every book has some sort of map in them, but a few had maps that showed different routes the Vikings traveled.

During our second week of study, I printed out a Viking Map that I found online for free. We were able to mark where the Vikings lived, where they raided, and where they settled. It was super simple and easy to do together. The website where I found this gave an example of the finished product so there was no guessing or researching for me.

baking Birka bread

Baking Bread

I planned to make a bread recipe that we found in one of our books from the library, “Viking Longships”. The recipe was for something called Birka bread. I’m not sure what happened, but it smelled bad, and it looked like slop. It did not have a dough consistency, so I was unsure how it would turn out.

I quickly found another recipe I saved on Pinterest and threw it together so that we could try both breads. It was really easy, and I happened to have all of the ingredients already in my pantry.

The Birka bread was sort of like a pancake consistency and had a sweet flavor. It definitely tasted better than it smelled. A couple of my kids actually preferred it over the other. The other bread was very dense and pretty dry. It was good with butter and honey.

Either way, it was fun to make and eat what the Vikings may have eaten long ago!

Viking lunch

Viking Lunch

This was probably the easiest themed lunch I’ve ever done. I had everything already at home and decided to throw it together last minute. I found the idea from a blog post that suggested to read “Leif the Lucky” along with it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find that one at the library OR a good quality read aloud on Youtube. So, we just ate the lunch!

All it took was a PBJ sandwhich, pretzels, raisins and bananas. My kids were so surprised and thought it was so cute. Now, if you see the picture, the bananas act like horns on the helmet. However, from what we’ve been reading, that’s actually a false representation of a Viking helmet. Real viking helmets did NOT have horns. Fun fact of the day!

viking runes

Art/ Runes

The Vikings art was really in their craftsmanship. The carvings, and weapons, and jewelry were all really neat to see in our library books. We were also able to see runes, which are kind of like a Viking alphabet. We used one of our books that had a chart of all the runes to do a simple and fun activity.

Using a toothpick, we carved words into Play Doh to make it look like runes on stone. It was neat to see our names written that way.

My oldest and I enjoyed cracking the code a little bit. Her and I would come up with a 3-4 letter word and use the chart to try and decode the message. This can get tricky because some symbols represent multiple letters.

drinking horn snack

Snack – Drinking Horns

When I saw that the Vikings used drinking horns, I was certain there was a craft for that, but didn’t find anything! So, I came up with my own simple little snack to pretend we were Vikings.

You’ll need the triangular shaped waffle cones to be your horn. We filled ours with yogurt and granola to make a simple parfait, but you could definitely fill it with ice cream or something else.

That’s it! It was so silly and fun, and the kids loved saying “Cheers” before eating it.

Music

The DK find out! series had a page on the music that might have been played during Viking times. Over lunch one day I read through this page as we observed the different types of instruments and read about how they were used.

I found this GREAT selection of videos from YouTube that shared more about the same instruments and the guy hosting the video even played them. It was really neat, and it brought the instruments to life for us. The videos are short and sweet and made the instruments very memorable!

viking language arts

Language Arts

During this unit, I was re-evaluating our language arts program and trying some new things for my oldest daughter. While doing that, we were able to use the history books we read for a few language arts lessons, which was really a lot of fun.

I would read a story about the Vikings from the library. Then, my daughter would write 2-3 sentences about what we read. I’d sit down with her and help her edit her sentences or add to them if we needed to.

As a treat, I’d let her add a picture from an online drawing video. I’ll link the two videos we used below:

This was really a great way for us to incorporate our studies into language arts and it really inspired me to do it more.

Notebook/Portfolio

At the end of each unit we do, I like to have the kids draw a little keepsake for our study. It’s very simple. I have them tell me about something they learned and write it down on the paper (Sometimes my oldest will write it on her own) Next, they draw a picture.

While we did this, we listened to an audio book about vikings, “How to be a Viking” by Cressida Cowell. This book was written by the author of the “How to Train Your Dragon” series. We learned that this picture book was the one that started it all!

We keep all of these drawings in a binder, and it’s so neat to go back and look at all of the things we’ve learned together over the year. This is my first year doing a portfolio like this, and I will definitely continue!

We loved studying the Vikings!

This was such a fun study for us. A couple random things to add in…We did watch How to Train Your Dragon 2 during our study because it’s technically about Vikings. I was actually kind of disappointed with it. The movie itself was fine, but the Vikings didn’t look like what we studied and they didn’t even ride in longships! So, that ended up being kind of a bummer for me. Maybe the first one is better about that? I haven’t seen it in a while.

This next thing is not really kid-friendly…but I’ll share anyway. During our unit study, my husband and I started watching the series called “Vikings”. It was originally produced by the History Channel but eventually it moved to the Prime app. We started it about a week before our unit kicked off, and it got me really pumped up to begin our study. JUST A HEADS UP – this show is very gory, creepy/disturbing at times (I’m talkin’ human sacrifices and such…yikes!), and there are some love scenes as well. Like I said, NOT child friendly at all. However, it was very fun to connect with my husband in a way that related to our homeschool studies! So, watch at your own risk…everyone has their preferences.

Well, that about does it for our history unit! I always hated history as a child, but I am loving it as I study with my children. I feel so blessed to have these days with them. Have you studied the Vikings yet? I’d love to know if you do any of these activities! Comment below or tag me on Instagram @simply.learning.together. I love hearing from you guys!

More Unit Studies

NEW – American History

Ancient Egypt

Ancient China

Space

Weather

Knights and Castles

Novel Units

The Secret Garden

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle

The Boxcar Children

The Courage of Sarah Noble

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Christmas Picture Book Activities

nativity lunch

When we get to the holidays, our schedules tend to fill up. I know in our homeschool, I’m ready to wind down as we prepare to celebrate. I’m always looking for something super easy, and the solution for us has been books! This Christmas I invite you to simplify your routine and try this out.

Below is a list of books. Each book is absolutely wonderful on it’s own, but sometimes it’s fun to add a little something extra, but simple! With each book, I have described a short activity to go along with it.

Choose one of these, two of these, or do them all. That’s it! No worksheets, no schedule, just read the books with your kiddos. If you want to add in the activity, go for it! We have loved using picture books to study during the Christmas season, and I hope it can do the same for you and your family too!

This post contains affiliate links. If you follow one of my links I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my blog!

Great Joy

BOOK: “Great Joy” by Kate DiCamillo

This sweet story follows a girl with a big heart who wants to share the Christmas spirit with a lonely man she sees sleeping on the street.

ACTIVITY: Angel Ornaments – Any time I look for a craft, I want something unique but also with supplies I know I will have around the house. I most always have craft sticks, so the only kicker in this supply list was the yarn. However, the cuteness-factor of this craft motivated me to purchase the yarn and go for it. This angel is so sweet, and I think my kids will adore seeing the final product.

watercolor christmas tree

Christmas Farm

BOOK: “Christmas Farm” by Mary Lyn Ray

In this story, a woman asks the help of her neighbor to plant Christmas trees on her property. Their time and hard work result in a beautiful Christmas tree farm that they can share with their community.

ACTIVITY: There are so many different ideas out there to craft a Christmas tree. I’ll share a few simple ones here, but the picture above is an example that’s great for little ones! I drew the outline of the tree and had my little ones paint it with green watercolor. Next, I provided them with q-tips and paint to make ornaments. This was so simple and turned out cute! Listed below are a few more Christmas tree ideas:

The Gingerbread Man

BOOK: “The Gingerbread Man” by Karen Scmidt

This classic story about a runaway gingerbread man is entertaining and silly. The pictures are fun and the ending is a bit of a surprise!

ACTIVITY: This one may seem obvious, but it’s a great opportunity to bake gingerbread cookies together. We’ve been using the same recipe for years and it’s absolutely delicious! If you want to make it even simpler, you could play with play dough instead. Use gingerbread cookie cutters and things like beads or buttons to decorate.

nativity lunch

The First Christmas Night

BOOK: “The First Christmas Night” by Keith Christopher

This rhyming book tells the story of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus starting from the arrival to the stable. The pictures are so beautiful and almost look like real people!

ACTIVITY: I found this precious nativity lunch idea on Pinterest, and it turned out adorable. (Get directions and FREE printable here) One thing I loved about it was that the food was pretty good for you! (Minus the marshmallow sheep and candy gifts) This was SO easy to add into our day because we actually had almost all of the items, and we eat lunch every day! No extra time needed.

As a side note, we used our play doh shapes to make the star. I bought these play doh shapes years ago when my oldest was a toddler. They are awesome and get used all the time!

Merry Christmas

Happy Reading! I hope you enjoy these books with your family. If you end up doing one of the activities along with it, I’d love to hear about it! Send me a message or tag me on Instagram @simply.learning.together