This is our second year at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. The kids are loving Sunday School and choir. This year our choir director planned out a rather fun and musical 30 min program called ONCE UPON A STARRY NIGHT. This is the first year all 5 of our kids are involved in a program. We had 3 stars, a shepherd and a wise man with a solo. In fact, all but Echo had speaking parts as well! So much of our December and a bit of November was spent with lots of practicing. 

The girls both wore their special Christmas dresses. This is the second time wearing these as we dressed up in our best for Santa earlier in the month (that picture to follow as well). Miss Echo was especially proud of her blue dress and star! 

I was very proud of Trinity. She used learning her lines as a way to improve her writing and for the first time ever was willing to stand at the front of the church AND say something into a microphone! 

Emanuel was a wonderful shepherd though his headgear did not make it down the aisle for the procession in. 

Gavin was a wonderful star and helped Trinity along with her lines.

Zander was loud and clear and sang beautifully! 

We even had guests come! Not only Nana and Baba but Renee, Nathan and Evan! Talk about exciting. Being able to share our pageant with friends was great fun. We go to Evan’s musical night on Tuesday which just happens to be at the huge Catholic church literally down the street a bit from here! 

All in all an adorable concert with the kids so proud of themselves. We ended it with bags of goodies… all sorts of traditional Christmas treats!

Quite the wonderful morning! A much loved Advent tradition.

Waiting and stitching before service. We had to come there by 9:30 for the 10:45 service as usual so they could do a run through.

Ken even SHAVED for the event (the day before but still… not bad!).

Trinity with a couple friends.

Ready for the procession in.

The babies are so adorable!

3 Wise Men… Persons… Wise Persons.

Singing

There was an adorable lost sheep solo too… Baa-bara had a song to sing.

Singing around Baby Jesus.

Our littlest star… she even sang some of the words!!!

And again…

It was a joy to be able to wear again the June wedding guest dress this time with the red crinoline underneath!

November 23-27

In preparation for Thanksgiving the next week, we spent a portion of Saturday cleaning. The twins have become rather pro at cleaning the bathroom!

We had homemade poutine for supper as well! One of the main foods I miss living down here. How can you go wrong with fries, gravy and cheese??

We had our usual Sunday School on Sunday… with the added excitement of have the twins take on SPEAKING parts in the Christmas pageant! So we have songs to learn AND some dialogue. Quite the ambitious addition to our homeschooling days.

The week of Thanksgiving started with the usual day of school. Heavy on the Thanksgiving theme. After all, Trinity REALLY loves a good themed worksheet!

Thanks to Activity Village

With a cornucopia craft as well. This is included in the reference blog post I will post with our completion. Just a two page print out where we coloured the horn and then the fruits and veg. The added suggestion was to have something we are thankful for on each piece of food but with how many activities we have done with the same idea we chose to just colour and glue.

We had time for tv together time…

AND making little decorative hats with Nana. yarn and rings of toilet paper rolls! Adorable!!

The first time…

And then another day… we actually made these over the span of a week!

We continued our Thanksgiving theme with storytime. A Louisa May Alcott story that has included an interesting apple based recipe we may need to try one day.

Trinity and Emanuel STARTED a craft with Daddy that uses coffee filters to make the tail of a turkey. You draw on it with markers and then wet them down to spread the ink.

Daddy also assisted in the assembly of our long awaited Grocery Unit. So much gluing and pasting and a little singing of the song we learned. You can see our resources and links on our companion blog entry HERE.

Of course we had to continue our Minnesota learning… the state bird is the common loon!!

There was another Thanksgiving book… though this one was more of a Halloween/Thanksgiving idea. It was in the Thanksgiving section at the library though and the kids really enjoyed it!

I think my days rather jumbled together here… but those were  the high points of our Thanksgiving week up to… well… the day! With a completed lapbook under our belt we ended our learning before Thanksgiving on a high note, that is for sure!

… and here it is! Gavin is Joseph at the manger of course… I am so proud of my boys!