Mommy Monday: Christmas activities bucket list with preschoolers

Last week I shared my top tip for handling the holiday season: plan ahead for lots of little things to get you in the holiday spirit and spend time with your family without getting stressed and overwhelmed. I am going to be using my DIY advent calendar again that I made last year to put pieces of paper in showing the day's little activity. Today I wanted to share my list of activities for my almost-4-year-old girls and I to do each day this holiday season!

Here are our activities for this year:

1. bake sugar cookies
2. decorate sugar cookies
3. deliver cookies to friends
4. wrap presents
5. pick out presents
6. get out felt tree
7. get out big Christmas tree
8. decorate Christmas tree
9. hang Christmas lights
10. call family and friends
11. go see Christmas lights
12. make gingerbread house
13. make Christmas cards
14. hang stockings
15. mail Christmas cards
16. eat candy canes
17. get out Nativity sets
18. sing Christmas carols
19. visit Santa
20. read Christmas books
21. make marshmallow snowmen
22. make hand and footprint reindeer
23. take family photo
24. give presents to teachers

If you're interested, here is my list of activities from last year (when the girls were almost 3).

The key to success with this system is having everything planned and set up at the beginning of the month so there are no more errands and to-do's to kill your joy and stress you out. Here are all of the supplies I am preparing (buying/getting out of storage) so we can enjoy all of these activities!

1. sugar cookie dough
2. sprinkles/frosting for cookies (and gingerbread house)
3. gingerbread house kit
4. marshmallows
5. food pens
6. candy canes
7. felt Christmas tree
8. Christmas tree
9. Christmas lights
10. tree ornaments
11. wrapping paper/ribbon
12. Nativity sets
13. Christmas books
14. postage stamps

What are some of your favorite things to do during the holiday season? I'm very excited to get started tomorrow with my girls!

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Fermata Friday: November 27, 2015

Welcome to this week's installment of my weekly linky party, Fermata Fridays! This is a chance for music education bloggers to share blog posts with readers and bloggers alike, so we can all mingle and learn from each other. Readers, you are going to love all of the awesome blog posts that are out there- I hope you discover some new blogs to follow and get some new inspiration for your teaching! Bloggers, make sure you read the directions carefully before linking up to make sure we keep the party fun for everyone. Thanks! :)

Here are the rules for the linky party:

1. Add the linky image to your blog post, blog sidebar, linky party roundup, or other similar location on your blog and link it back to the party. Copy and paste the code for this button, or use the image above and link to the label "Fermata Fridays".

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://caldwellorganizedchaos.blogspot.com/search/label/Fermata%20Fridays"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD5AShYQiAk-NC2PM5EMpGrK31c3bfaUO7qbi6cCVXVIW-ySfO3xfYbJOj0WAbRcl11hVrCCWLIiqFjqs2cV8Yu8Zw-HEdtId-jZRpwv-W6p9VwBWQZvreaxjOfVBwlw-YdvMr_BbR3M0/s1600/fermata+friday+button.jpg" /></a></div><br />

2. Add up to two blog post links to the linky. The posts can be old or new (but no posts that have already been linked up to Fermata Fridays in the past), on any topic related to music teaching, but must not be primarily featuring a product. It's fine to have a link to a relevant product within a post, but that should not be the primary focus of the post. I reserve the right to delete a link that is too product-focused. If you're not sure, just ask! :)

3. Leave a thoughtful comment on at least two other links, including the one right before yours. Add #fermatafridays to your comment so bloggers know where you found them!

4. Pin at least one post to one of your Pinterest boards.

5. Make sure you are following me on Pinterest. I will be pinning every link to the Fermata Fridays board each week.

6. Make sure you are following me on Facebook and check back next Friday- I will be featuring one of the links from the previous week's linky on my Facebook page each Friday!

The linky will be open every Friday until 4:00am EST Saturday morning.

An InLinkz Link-up

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Teacher Tuesday: handling the holidays

Yesterday I shared my top tips for enjoying the holiday season (and not getting stressed) at home with your family and children (you can check out that post here). But music teachers face just as much (if not more) stress over holiday events at work, between caroling, concerts, and everything else we are expected to do (and oh yeah, teach)! Today I am sharing my tips for keeping stress at bay at work when you are a music teacher in the middle of the holiday season.

1. Plan for review, and little else, in your long-range plans for December

If you want to read more about how I go about making my long-range plans for each grade that I teach, check out this post. One thing that I have learned over the years is to never plan too much for the month before a long break (December and June, in my case). I don't have to stress as much about getting behind because I have some buffer built in twice a year, and if the students are on track, I can plan for some low-pressure lessons during the crazy "holidays are coming" seasons. This is a great time to review concepts that we have been practicing over the last few months, do some fun holiday-related songs and games, and build musical memories for my students! It reduces my workload a lot when I don't have to worry about pushing to teach a long list of concepts.

2. Plan way ahead for performances

I plan everything for my fall/winter performances during summer break, and plan all of my spring performances over winter break. I start by figuring out my end goal (the songs/ show I want the students to perform), figure out when I will rehearse, build in 2 rehearsals for just "run-through's", and plan backwards from there to figure out when I need to start practicing for the performance. 

I know what you're thinking. OK, that's all well and good for next year, but this doesn't help me for this year- it's too late to plan ahead! All this does is make me feel guilty! Not to worry. You can apply the same principles even at this late hour ;) Lesson plans? Trust in the fact that you have worked as hard as you could these last few months and give you and your students a chance to breathe, review, reflect, and have fun. Over break, you can figure out your game plan to fit everything else in before summer. Performance preparation? Use the same backwards planning strategy to make sure you are ready for the stage. That may mean planning an extra rehearsal or cutting a song from the program, but believe me, it is far better to have a calm director and smooth, successful performance than to have a stressed out director and a jam-packed performance on the brink of falling apart. 

I hope you all enjoy this holiday season- it really is a lovely time of year, even with all of the craziness. Hopefully these tips will help you have less crazy and more lovely :) 

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Mommy Monday: handling the holidays

The holiday season is officially upon us. The thought can strike both dread and joy in every parent's heart! It is a vicious cycle: we want to make sure we savor the special moments, especially with our young children, but in order to fully accomplish that we have quite the list of things we want to do, which makes us so busy that we can't enjoy them at all. Today I want to share my top tip for both fitting in all of the wonderful traditions and memory-making moments, and making sure we don't spend the whole season preparing for everything and miss out on the moments themselves.

So are you ready for my tip?

Make a hybrid bucket-list-schedule-thing for the month of December (or whatever you consider your "holiday season" to be). It should include lots of little things, not too many big things, and many of those little things should be things that you feel an "obligation" to do, for one reason or another (like buying gifts or sending cards).

You would think making a list of lots of little things to do with your family for the holidays would make things more stressful, but planning ahead for all of those little things will actually help you avoid the panicky feeling of, "oh no, it's Christmas Eve and we never even baked any cookies!". I know it sounds frivolous but if we are honest with ourselves, I think most people are with me on this- it may not be baking cookies but everyone has things that, if left undone, stress you out.

I will be using the same advent calendar I made last year for my daughters- you can read more about my muffin tin calendar, with a small activity to do together each day in December, by clicking on the picture:

I planned a small activity for each day, and I'll be changing some of those this year now that the girls are older but many will stay the same (you can see my full list from last year, when the girls were 2, in this blog post). Things like driving around to see Christmas lights, wrapping presents, putting up the Christmas tree, singing a Christmas carol... you get the idea. The key is to break up bigger activities/tasks (like decorating the house) into smaller chunks (like putting up the tree, putting up lights, decorating the tree etc) and turn your "chores" into "activities"!

You don't need a fancy advent calendar to accomplish the same effect though- you can easily write something down for each day on a calendar or even just make a list to hang on the fridge. The important thing is that you make a plan in advance, before you get caught up in the hustle and bustle and things get lost in the shuffle. Just don't get too attached to the plan- that's why I call it a hybrid with a bucket list. Start off knowing that you will want to move things around, switch up the days, or replace things as you go through the season.

The last point to keep in mind is to prepare everything you need for anything you are planning to do in advance as well. This is actually the key difference between stressing out over all the things you want to fit in and being able to enjoy doing lots of fun things without the stress. Buy the gingerbread house kit, pull out the Christmas lights, buy the tickets for the Christmas train ride. Have all the materials ready before Thanksgiving and then sit back and enjoy the season! Last year I gathered everything around Thanksgiving time and stored everything in a closet that the girls don't use. Then each day I knew I just had to pull out what I needed and we were good to go!

What are your top tips for enjoying the holidays? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments!

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