Experience A Gentle Advent this year!
Charlotte Mason style Advent Learning
Does the busyness of the holiday season seem to runaway with you?
Does it feel like Christmas arrives and your entire season is a blur, leaving you wondering if your children really understand why we celebrate? Have you even talked about Jesus outside of church?
I know how that feels. I want my own children to know that Christmas is not about Santa, getting everything on their list, or baking endless sugar cookies, but that we are celebrating the Greatest Gift!
I want Advent to be a time for them to grow close to their Savior.
I desperately wanted a simple approach to help teach them devotion, reflection, generosity, and to enjoy the beauty of the Advent season in all its glorious expectation.
Can you relate?
A Gentle Advent was born from the desire to have a calm and bright celebratory season. A way to stop the season from running away with us. A way to escape the overwhelm that threatens each December. A way to draw our family closer to each other and closer to our Lord.
And honestly, I wanted a way to keep learning trough the holiday season without feeling so overwhelmed by "homeschool" amid all the other opportunities for worship, service, and quiet cozy time together as winter settles in.
Advent Morning Time Plans
We do Holiday Homeschool around here. That means during Advent, our studies are basically our morning time homeschool plans with math added on and our read-aloud loop. We use A Gentle Advent for our morning time plans. With 4 to choose from, I’ve been able to keep us on a loop without the boys getting bored.
This keeps us on an academic schedule (super important for my boys), and ensures that we actually follow through with Advent studies. Keeping our family focused on the true meaning of the season is very important to us.
Our holiday homeschool includes lots of handicrafts, reading aloud (see our 20 favorite Advent read alouds here!), music, art, baking, and activities in addition to our morning time and Advent study. This keeps our minds active and our hearts full. What better way to maneuver homeschool through the holiday season?
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Morning Basket Schedule for Advent
Our Holiday Homeschool starts slowly. Coffee and cocoa, gentle music like Midwinter Carols wafting through the air as we cuddle under warm blankets with our mugs, and lots of chatting about the day. Somewhere around 10 we settle in for our Scripture journaling and to plan for our activity for the day.
Each volume of A Gentle Advent contains daily activities and a Scripture/gratitude journal to use each day. A Gentle Advent has more of a traditional morning time feel contained within the subjects and activities while A Gentle Advent - Jesse Tree has more handicrafts and activities to engage your whole family as well as ornaments coordinating with each day’s scriptures to help your children remember what they are learning.
A Gentle Advent - Colonial Christmas is a delight for history loving families while A Gentle Advent - Further Up, Further In is perfect for middle and upper grade students with the Scripture study and readings focused on Revelation and the coming of King Jesus.
After we finish our journaling and activities, we spend the day listening to audiobooks, enjoying classic movies like A Christmas Carol, practicing our musical instruments, or playing outside weather permitting. There is no hard and fast schedule, but we keep to a general schedule so that come January 1st, we don't have a major uphill battle to get back into the swing of homeschool. We do just enough to keep ourselves accountable without draining ourselves trying to keep it all done during such a busy time.
After dinner, we often gather by the fire for family game time or to listen to a favorite Christmas story. It truly is a gentle season and we approach it with much grace.
Advent Readings for Your Family
Every volume of A Gentle Advent contains a beautiful set of Advent candle readings for your family to use with your Advent wreath. There are 5 readings, one for each candle on Advent Sundays and for the Christ Candle on Christmas Day.
Jesse Tree also contains optional ornaments for your tree to help visualize the Scripture readings each day. The ornaments can be cut out as they are, or mounted onto ornament frames, or transferred and burned onto wooden discs.
A Gentle Advent is a curriculum containing both digital elements (video and audio files included as links/downloads) and PDFs for you to print. There are multiple activities for you to enjoy, and inspiration to guide you through this season.
These activities are all meant to flow through what our family calls "Holiday Homeschool". We do a light version of homeschool during the holiday season and this allows us to stay in the habit of learning, but also allows us to explore the season. A Gentle Advent will work for your family through regular, light, or "take the month of December off" homeschooling.
There is also a private community on Mighty Networks for families using A Gentle Advent to share their projects and ask questions. This group is ad free and off Facebook so you can interact without the potential distraction of “scrolling”.
We hope you’ll join us for A Gentle Advent this year!