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Classroom Christmas lessons and activities
It’s almost Christmas again and here in Australia we’re on the countdown to the end of the school year and our long summer holidays. Whether you’ll be enjoying a long break or a shorter break over the festive season, here at readilearn we’ve got many ready-to-teach lessons and activities to support your teaching in the lead-up to Christmas.
Get an early start with these lessons and activities
You will get most benefit from some activities if you begin them a few weeks before the finish of term.
Friendship Trees, one of readilearn’s most popular Christmas activities is best begun three to four weeks before school closes for Christmas. Children make their own friendship trees which are then placed on display in the classroom.
Each day children write anonymous messages of affirmation or friendship to each other and place them in the trees. At the end of term, children take their trees home and read the positive messages contained within.
The trees help to develop self-esteem, confidence and friendship skills and are perfect for those last few weeks when temperatures soar and children can become edgy with excitement for the holidays.
A 3D Christmas tree makes a beautiful focal point of the classroom Christmas display. Children cooperatively construct the tree by contributing leaves made by tracing or printing their hands. It is a visible recognition of the value of teamwork and will be admired (and envied) by many. It makes a beautiful background for photographs of individual children to be given as gifts to parents or other loved ones.
The free countdown calendar How many school days until Christmas? helps you count the last fifteen days (three weeks) of the term. The calendar is available in two formats — Christmas or holiday-themed — you choose the one that suits your class best. The calendar can be used simply to count down the days of school remaining or to record special school events or activities.
Literacy lessons and activities
Teaching literacy across the curriculum is a major focus of readilearn lessons. There is no reason to remove opportunities for teaching and learning simply because we are focussing on a fun theme. The majority of readilearn lessons are ready for you to teach. Simply familiarise yourself with them, and they are ready to go with little extra preparation time involved.
Learning with favourite Christmas characters
Who’s Hiding At Christmas? is a fun story with a repetitive structure and text that supports beginning and developing readers. It is a digital story in a lesson ready to teach on the interactive whiteboard. Children are presented with a series of clues about familiar Christmas characters and must guess who is hiding.
Children can use the structure to make their own Who’s Hiding? Stories after reading. The printable template makes it easy for children to structure and write their stories which make a wonderful gift for friends, siblings, parents or grandparents at Christmas.
The story is also available in a format that can be printed for independent or small group reading. (Who’s Hiding at Christmas? —printable)
Other resources that support your teaching and children’s learning using these resources include:
Christmas character cut-outs can be used in a variety of ways such as props for storytelling or plays, classroom decorations or gift tags. (Suggestions are included in the resource.)
Christmas word cards is a set of 12 Christmas-themed word cards that can be used as a reference for writing.
Christmas character descriptions is a set of printable posters with words and phrases describing the characters in Who’s Hiding at Christmas? The posters make an excellent reference for children’s writing.
The Christmas crossword is a fun way of providing independent practice after reading the story. If children require assistance in spelling words, they can use the Christmas word cards or Christmas character descriptions as references.
Writing Christmas poems
Christmas poems are fun to write and become personalised verses for the inside of cards or posters to gift to others. This interactive resource is ready to teach on the interactive whiteboard. Choose the type of poem you would like to teach, read the sample poems and use them to as a model for writing a poem together. Print out the templates for children to write poems of their own.
Five different poetic forms are included in the resource:
- Acrostic
- Sound poems
- Haiku
- I love poems
- Shape poems.
The poems and templates are also available individually or together as part of the collection Christmas poetry —writing with children.
Puzzles and games
Which gift? Playing Secret Santa — a logic puzzle helps children develop logical thinking and deductive reasoning in an engaging theme. The ability to solve the puzzle also involves children in reading and comprehending and requires them to focus on the salient information.
Children use the clues to work out who received which gift from whom and in which paper it was wrapped. There are two separate puzzles for teaching and independent practice, as well as suggestions for children to make their own puzzles.
The Interactive 9 square Christmas puzzle is a fun problem-solving lesson ready to teach (or play) on the interactive whiteboard. As with other 9 square puzzles, each side of the squares must match to make a 3×3 grid.
The printable version of the 9 square Christmas puzzle is great for children to attempt independently when finished their work or to receive as a gift to play at home.
Mathematics
Do you celebrate Christmas? — Class survey provides children with an opportunity of getting to know a little more about each other, developing tolerance and understanding, while engaged in the mathematical processes of collecting and interpreting data.
Hang the Baubles – Repeating patterns is an interactive lesson or series of lessons ready to teach on the interactive whiteboard. The lessons can be used to introduce or review repeating patterns.
Other resources
Fine motor Christmas activities is a free list of six engaging craft activities that help to develop children’s fine motor skills as they have fun making decorations for the classroom or home.
2020 calendar features all your favourite Who’s Hiding at Christmas characters and is ready to print on an A4 sheet. The calendars can be given as gifts to children or parents. Mark the first day of school so there’s no forgetting! Print in different sizes to use as gift tags or in greeting cards.
2020 calendar bookmark is similar to the calendar but in a slightly different format to suit use as a bookmark.
Christmas gift labels is a set of gift tags ready to print.
All these and more are available to you for one small annual subscription cost of A$25. Alternatively, you may purchase individual items as you require them.
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I appreciate your feedback and comments. Please share your thoughts below.
What a beautiful idea for the ‘friendship tree’ Norah. This is a fun activity, while learning about friendships and kindness at the same time. Brilliant! 🙂 x
Thanks so much, Debby. My children always responded well to it and it definitely helped improve the tone of the class. 🙂
Absolutely! 🙂
You are smarter! You have educated me again. It was definitely a greener grass comment, perhaps because Christmas is coming. The holidays and breaks are always a disruption to learning complete with the “summer slide”, but I sure do like the breaks.
Happy Holidays, Teach!
We couldn’t survive without the breaks. Neither could the children. The terms are so full-on and stressful. Only a few more weeks until the break. Enjoy!
What a great collection of activities. I love the Friendship Tree. I’ve taught for 15 years in the classroom and never saw one. How did that happen???
Thank you, Jacqui. I’m pleased you find the activities appealing. I guess you didn’t see one of these trees because, like many of the readilearn resources, it’s a Norah original. I’m not sure where the idea came from but my children and I always enjoyed it.
looks like lots of great activities; thanks for sharing!
Thanks, Jim. Yes, they are lots of fun.
These are lovely Christmas ideas, Norah. I love the friendship hands tree. What a great idea.
Thank you so much, Robbie. My children (and their parents) and I always loved it. It think it was extra special because we all contributed to making it.
I think friendship trees would be a great addition to the workplace, too. You have so many wonderful activities that also support learning that it’s like early Christmas for parents and educators.
Thank you, Charli. There’d be nothing to stop workplaces having friendship trees. We (teachers) used to have Secret Santa in the last few weeks of school. We were encouraged to write positive messages, leave small gifts (like a chocolate) and clues about our identity each day for our special someone, finishing with a larger gift and revelation on the final day. I hadn’t made the connection about the similarity before.
Hi Norah!
It must be some easier to have the Christmas holiday wrapped in with summer break, maybe a little less disruptive? It’s a tough time in schools, the count down to Christmas. These seem like great activities to engage the younger ones.
Interesting comment, D. I guess the grass is always greener … I’ve always bemoaned that Christmas occurs in our summer break. Whether we have one or two weeks before Christmas, all the time seems to be taken up with Christmas preparations. Then there’s the ‘dead’ week between Christmas and New Year. Once New Year is over, it’s time to start preparing for the new school year which begins the week of about the 20th of January. Since we have only six weeks off, Christmas and New Year seem to take a big chunk of it. As you know it takes a couple of weeks to wind down from a school year too. We have more school days (I think about 20 which makes 4 weeks) each year than you do. We should be really smart! 🙂
Sharing! <3 xo
Thank you, Bette. Appreciated. 🦋