Are you looking for some easy Christmas activities for your kiddos? I’ve gathered some great ideas for you!
It’s that time of year … it’s cozy, busy, chaotic, and fun all at the same time! Our students are easily distracted and don’t really want to think about school work. They’d much rather think about Christmas trees or holiday traditions – the fun part of the holidays!
Being a teacher this time of year is more difficult than ever. We need to keep our students’ attention but still acknowledge their excitement about the holidays. One way to accomplish this is to use Christmas/holiday topics as the basis for lessons, games and activities. If you’re looking for more general types of winter activities, check out my previous post.
I’ve gathered some ideas for fun and engaging Christmas activities that your young students will enjoy.
Christmas activities for first and second grade
Here’s a fun Christmas STEM challenge. Use toothpicks and gumdrops in Christmas colors to build different parts of a Santa village!
Kids love to build things, and when you let them use candy it’s even better! There are lots of Christmas-y things that students can build with these simple materials.
For example, use the white colored gumdrops to make snowflakes. See how many different designs your kids can come up with.
Use green gumdrops to make Christmas trees, or use several different colors to make a chimney for Santa to climb down!
See if your students can come up with their own ideas of what to build. You might be surprised at what they do!
Make a pretty stained glass Christmas picture. For this Christmas activity you’ll need a picture that you’d like to use for your design, a paper plate or piece of cardboard or poster board that is big enough to hold the picture, a piece of aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and permanent markers.
- First, take the piece of aluminum foil and crinkle it up. Then carefully un-crinkle it and tape it over the paper plate or whatever you’re using for the background.
- Then tape the picture down on a table. Tape the piece of plastic wrap over it and trace around it with a black marker.
- Go ahead and color the plastic wrap with permanent markers.
- Finally, wrap the plastic wrap around the aluminum foil and tape it down in the back. It can then be hung up with some yarn or twine.
These could be fun decorations around your classroom. Then the students can take them home during the vacation.
Make Natural Ornaments
Try making some cinnamon and pine cone reindeer! You’ll need some large and small pine cones, cinnamon sticks of various lengths, glue or glue gun, google eyes or paper cutouts, and small red pompoms for the nose. Small twigs make great antlers!
These are simple and fun to make. Just glue all the parts together! Kids can add some twine or ribbon for hanging or use them in a grouping with some “snow” and sugar cone Christmas trees!
Christmas math and literacy activities
We can also use Christmas as the basis for some fun math and literacy lessons, too. My No Prep Christmas Math and Literacy Activities and Puzzles Pack is filled with engaging activities to practice important academic skills while still keeping that Christmas theme!
There are a total of 20 activities in the pack, with 10 each for math and literacy. There are a range of activities for differentiation. Some of the activities are challenging while some are just plain fun!
These Christmas activities have many uses. For example, they’re perfect for independent learning stations, early finishers, homework or distance learning. And they are no prep – just print them out and go! There are so many things to do during the holidays, both in and out of the classroom. This pack will help free up some of your very precious time!
