Industrious Emily: A week of St. Nicholas Lessons

A recap of our week-long St. Nicholas study. The kids wrote/drew all their work in homemade main lesson books (for us this means 9x12 colored paper for the covers with printer paper sandwiched between then sewn along one short edge). The majority of what we read came from this book.

Monday:

Read The Legend of the Three Daughters. (The Real St. Nicholas book)

Created a list of characters from the story.

Looked at pictures of St. Nicholas around the world (internet)

Drew a picture of St. Nicholas

This led to talking about the differences/similarities between St. Nicholas and how our culture describes "Santa" and then they drew comparison pictures of the two.

Tuesday:

Wrote out the previous day's story in MLB.

Older kids could do this on their own. Youngest wrote some and dictated some.

Cut out a map of Europe to paste in MLB to track where the stories we read are from.

Wednesday:

Looked back at our character lists from Monday and decided which characters were important enough to be needed for a skit of the story.

Assigned characters and then spent time journaling about the emotions and thoughts that character would have experienced over the course of the story. Then we went around and shared our ideas.

Acted out (and filmed) a skit of the Legend of the Three Daughters.

Read various short legends from around the world and mapped their location. (The Real St. Nicholas Book)

Made watercolor paintings of one of the legends we read.

Thursday:

Made stained glass bishop's miters per the tradition in Switzerland. (Exacto knives and hot glue guns were helpful tools, I wouldn't reccommend this activity for really little ones.)