Elf on the Shelf and Homeschooling

Last year for Christmas, my mom gave us an elf on the shelf. I think she sent it to us early and told us to open it soon, but in my brilliance I completely forgot. Luckily my kids were paying zero attention to me when I opened it (their little faces glued to their new kindles), so I was able to stash it away for the next year. Well, it’s the next year and I almost completely forgot about it, again! But was reminded as I was on Pintrest looking for fun Christmas themed homeschool stuff. I found a great way to incorporate the elf with morning journal writing and other activities.

For their first morning of homeschool, they came into “class” with the Elf (who is now named Zippy Lightning) sitting there looking oh so innocent. We read the book and wrote letters to Santa (yes, they still believe… Like hard core believe – and I love it!) And then we moved on. Tonight after they went to bed, Ben and I had a little fun playing Elf…

We thought we were VERY funny.  The boys not so much.  They were really insulted that the Elf would be so rude as to draw on our family pictures.  I believe Sam said, “What a little jerk!”

Okay….

So we decided that we’d probably better stick with nice and silly… safe.

This was well received!

The next night we had him Air Assault repealing off the ceiling light.  And they loved it… then Ben and I got this idea that it would be fun to do two parters.  Like have him doing something one night, and then have a part 2 of what he was doing.  It made moving him around super easy!  So after we had him repealing, Ben made him look like he had been trying to get off and got his his foot stuck and the boys found him hanging upside down the next morning.  The boys got a huge kick out of this!

This week, we had him decorate the class with Christmas bows… which would have bothered the boys, but we made sure the elf was paying the consequence of being naughty right off:

 And then I thought it would be fun and easy, to make this into another two parter and had the elf trap the soldiers instead.  Of course, this was received with many giggles.

Now, to make life a little easier on us, we told the boys that the elf goes back to the North Pole on Friday night and hangs out with the other elves on Saturday.  On Sunday he goes to church.  And he will come back on Monday… we needed to have weekends off so we didn’t burn out.