What to do...During Christmas Break

Okay, obviously everyone is going to have a different approach. We all face the same issue: with the earliest of readers, they need lots of practice. Taking two weeks off for Christmas, for example, can result in going backwards, right?

Well.

Right.

It can.

The question here is what is important to your family, what fits with your traditions, and...your philosophy of education.

I fully admit that after longer breaks, children are a bit behind where they left off. But not much, and it is usually fairly simple to catch them back up.

I recently read a fascinating post over at Inside Classical Education. Here's a little taste:

I was interviewing Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio recently, and asked him what he would hope to see if he observed a classical Christian school. I was braced by one of his responses: he would hope to see a rhythm of fasting and feasting. Fasting and feasting sounds strange to 21st century American ears, though it ought not sound so strange to American Christians trying to learn from the classical tradition. The church has practiced fasting and feasting for centuries. For various reason, many, perhaps most, American Christians have forgotten these practices—and so we are not likely to quickly bring them to our schools.

Ken’s comments got me thinking again about our need to re-examine and understand leisure, contemplation and rest as vital aspects of a classical education.

Fasting and feasting. In our home, this season is a season of feasting. We do reading lessons during the first three weeks of Advent (a little less--three per week instead of four or five), but all of our other activities are focused on the season. When we enter the fourth week of Advent, we stop lessons entirely (excluding the Advent lessons) until after the New Year. We stop, so that we can focus on the feasting aspect.

We bake cookies. Lots of cookies. And we take them to people we know. We make gingerbread houses. We prepare for the feasts with our extended family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And so on and so forth.

I think it is important that our children's education respect the family, the nature of the times and seasons, and so on. A little break can be refreshing, and we are renewed when we begin again.

There are basically three approaches to dealing with the holidays:

1. Take time off when the public schools take time off
2. Take time off for Christmas Eve/Day and other holidays only
3. Never take time off, other than weekends

There is also the taking off of time coinciding with the Church calendar--from Advent all the way until Epiphany. I like the idea of this in theory, but I tend to think that with my tiniest students I might literally have to begin again if I take almost six weeks off at this stage in the game.

Whichever you choose, I woud beg you to consider the implications of rest for education. My introduction to this idea was the book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which I highly recommend.