Winter and Holiday Activities

It’s the most magical time of the year.

Santa is getting presents ready. Elves are visiting classrooms (yes, we have an Elf on the Shelf). And creativity and kindness are abound.

Our Centers are filled with winter wonderful activities.

Art

• Cup snowmen – Use cups and white paint to create the body of the snowmen. We recycled scraps of construction paper to make branch arms, hats and scarves.
  
• Watercolor mittens – This week, we’re reading “The Mitten,” so students are watercoloring an outline of a mitten. They are using crayons to draw animals and objects inside the mitten. The wax from the crayon resists the watercolor, so you can see the crayon after it’s painted.

Science

• Peppermint experiment – Using our senses to explore what happens when we put candy canes in water
• Arctic animals in snow

Reading

• Five Little Snowmen finger play

Dramatic Play

• Santa’s workshop
  • Naughty/Nice List – Students can write classmates’ names
  • Fixing toys – Using tools to build, fix, and paint toys
  • Baking cookies – Using kitchen tools to bake Christmas cookies
  • Stuffing stockings – Cutting pictures of toys out of catalogs and gifting them to classmates by putting them in their stockings
  • Number ornaments – Placing ornaments in number order on our class tree

Writing

• Writing letters to Santa
• Making holiday cards for children in the hospital – I did this with my students last year, and they loved it! We mailed 30 cards to Cards for Hospitalized Kids last year. Although my kiddos are excited about getting presents, we’re learning that Christmas is not all about getting. It’s about giving.

Math

• Snowman addition – Using paint dotters, students build two snowmen. They count the dots on each snowman and create a number sentence.

• Christmas light patterns

We also made name snowmen in small groups and an equilateral triangle tree during large group. They did such a wonderful job on them!

For our monthly family involvement project, students and families decorated a gingerbread “person.” Some made minion gingerbread, some made Hello Kitty gingerbread, and of course there was an Olaf gingerbread. Why do they love Frozen so much?!?

Thanks for reading! Check back for more photos!