Tips for Balancing Holiday Homeschooling with High Schoolers

The holidays are a time for creating moments with the family.  Many homeschooling parents choose to take the entire month of December off to participate in holiday events, including the Sparks Academy online homeschool co-op, but there is a way to seamlessly incorporate this festive period into your school days.

Strategies For Balancing Homeschool and Holidays

Some strategies for balancing school and holidays include shifting to unit studies and crafting with a purpose.  It also helps to reframe what counts as “schoolwork,” where nature walks equate to science, journaling to language arts, budgeting to math, and volunteering to civics and social studies.

Shift to Unit Studies

There are a plethora of holiday-themed unit studies for all ages, though they can be more difficult to find or plan for high school students.  It’s time for Holiday Homeschool! features a wide range of ideas that cover your core subjects, plus electives, for middle and high school students.  There are also family-style resources for togetherness-learning.

If you want to create your own, you can use the Unit Study Planner to plan resources and activities around a particular topic.  Some examples of activities include journaling and writing gratitude lists (language arts), studying the physics of snowflakes (science), exploring the economics of holiday shopping (math), reading seasonal short stories (literature), studying the winter solstice (astronomy), or researching the origins of various winter holidays (history).

Crafting with a Purpose

With the holidays often come gift-giving, and this is a fantastic opportunity to apply some hands-on learning.  History and chemistry combine into a day of candle-making.  Making ornaments from natural objects, such as pinecones, bark, and berries, combines both botany and the fundamentals of art.  Scaling up family recipes to bake up enough for the entire neighborhood becomes a yummy lesson in both algebraic formulas and chemical reactions.

One of the school parts of both gift-giving and crafting is budgeting, a lesson in math and economics.  If you participate in the RACK program (Random Acts of Christmas/Community Kindness), it can be expensive to surprise folks daily, and may help to choose only one or two items, purchasing supplies in bulk to save money.  If you’re unsure of where to start, here are several frugal homemade craft ideas for gifts.

However, if you truly love crafting, have an unlimited budget, or have many boxes of different supplies on hand, it can be helpful to create a ‘choice box,’ where folks can look through all of the handmade goodies and pick their special gift.  This method can be more expensive the first year, but friends and family get something they will use, and you get a better idea of where to purchase bulk supplies for the following year.

Tips For Transitioning From Holiday Homeschool To January

As you’re planning your holiday homeschool, a few things that help transitioning from the holidays back into the spring semester include:

• Stick as closely as possible to your routines, including reading time and bedtimes.  This helps everyone maintain that inner clock.
• Space events out through the month so that it’s not a whirlwind of activities all at once.  This helps to build and exit the season.
•  Limit spending and space out gifts.  This way, everyone has the space to practice thankfulness, appreciation, and gratitude – all things we struggle with due to intensities.
• Plan field trips for January once schools are back in session.  This helps to feel like life hasn’t turned dull after the holiday crazies, and those places tend to be less crowded and more fun at this time.

Happy holiday homeschooling, friend! 🎄

Want More Holiday Homeschool Tips?

We’ve got you covered with additional posts all about balancing homeschool during the holidays!

• 10 Great Ways To Energize Your Homeschool In December
• Simple Holiday Learning Tips with Homeschooling Through The Holidays 2025
• 5 Simple Tips To Help You Energize Winter Homeschooling

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