Christmas activities can be valuable learning or assessment tasks. I like to make special times of the year memorable for children by altering the program slightly while continuing to strengthen literacy and numeracy skills. The worksheets available here can be put together to form a Christmas workbook that can be picked up each day for short periods. Add pages from other sources to make a variety of enjoyable tasks that will appeal to all. I have added dot to dots, word finds, puzzles, mazes, symmetry activities etc. to my students' workbooks and they have kept even very young children on task while small groups are working on Christmas crafts or other activities.
45 simple number facts and 15 instruction cards are included
Class Surveys
Get everybody into the Christmas season with a daily class survey about different cultural aspects of Christmas. Share how different families celebrate, eat and decorate for Christmas. Have fun with some simple personal choice questions. Each child is given a counter (or sometimes they will need more than 1), and take it in turns to put their counter under the most appropriate answer. Choose a child to count the totals for each choice and discuss which is the 'most' popular or 'least' popular choice. This is a great chance to model counting by 2s when the votes get up to higher numbers past 10. This activity could be done on the mat with children sitting in a circle, or on a whiteboard with magnets for the counters. It could also be set up as an activity for children to complete on the way into class and then discussed once everyone is together.
These worksheets can be used with pre-readers by reading the instructions aloud to the class or a small group, or they can be given to younger readers as an independent task.
This activity does not need to be marked, as it a worthwhile task to simply observe as students complete it. To save paper, copy these worksheets back to back and cut so that each child has the picture on one side and the instructions on the back. This way, when it is sent home, parents can see what instructions were followed and how accurate their child's responses were.
Instructions for this fun activity are included, as well as colourful labels to tie on. This makes a nice decoration for the Christmas tree and then use the contents on Christmas Eve.
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