Christmas Comes to America-Homeschool Legacy

We always enjoy changing up our schooling routine and Homeschool Legacy provides us this opportunity. They offer a variety of once-a-week unit studies covering a multitude of interesting subjects. We recently had the chance to review Christmas Comes to America.

Homeschool Legacy unit studies are offered in both digital and print format. When purchasing the digital format, you are also given clickable links that further enhance the learning experience. The beauty behind these unit studies is that all the work is done for you. You are provided a book list that even includes the call number for the books. The lesson plans are already laid out with ideas and activities, list of supplies needed, field trip suggestions, etc

While this specific unit study covered Christmas, it incorporated subjects such as:

•  history (of Christmas traditions)
• geography (such as locating on a map the birth place of Saint Nicholas)
• life skills (making of several recipes and gifts to give out)
• music (listening to different types of music and naming composers)
• arts and crafts (making a gingerbread house)
• science (making an "after Christmas tree" for the birds)

And those are just a few of the activities included in this unit study. The beginning of the unit study explains just how to use it. The suggested schedule is to do unit study reading and family read-alouds Monday and Tuesday, On Wednesday, they suggest putting aside your regular schoolwork and focus solely on the unit study and completing the different activities as well as doing the family devotional. Thursday you again just do the unit study reading and family read-aloud and Friday they suggest doing a field trip as well as a family movie or game night which again, there are suggested movies to watch that go along with the unit study. Obviously this is just a suggested schedule with plenty of flexibility to make it suit each families schedule.

I appreciated the fact that most of their unit studies cover a wide range of grades. This one was for grades 2 through 12. For a family like ours with varying ages, everyone is able to get involved and we simply tailor the level of work  and reading to each of their abilities. We all enjoy when we can do projects and studies together! Also, there really wasn't any required printing from the PDF download. Most everything included was instructions and directions.

Another bonus to these unit studies is that if your child is part of Boy Scouts or American Heritage Girl, this unit study lists what they need to do to earn their Music Badge. While my children aren't a part of either, I can see how this would be beneficial in not only adding the unit study to their schooling but to complete a badge at the same time!

We found it intriguing how each week covered a different piece of Christmas from different cultures. Dutch, Germans, English and American histories and traditions were all discussed. From their original pagan starts and how they eventually became the Christian traditions we now know. We look forward to revisiting this unit study come December!

Homeschool Legacy offers many different unit studies. In fact, you can check out the previous unit study we did, Weather On the Move.