Our Favorite Christmas Lessons


Over the years we've typically spent the entire month of December focused on Christmas.  We take a break from all our traditional school books and school work and find ways to have fun learning while focusing on Christmas cheer.  Each year I usually plan an entire day around a book and movie selection.  As they've gotten older we've expanded that to a few books each day but we still try to keep with a theme within the Christmas idea.

We try to make sure each day includes some reading, some writing, a craft, a movie, a special snack, and some math.  


Here are some of our favorite days from past years named after the movies we watched (click on the links for more detailed information):

1. Prancer day-- We planned a full day's worth of activities around reindeer.  We read Where's Prancer and The little Reindeer (which was SO CUTE!), they made pet reindeer and wrote about them, and ate reindeer cookies.  We played a fun math/ logic game called Rudolph's Crazy Cookie Exchange.  You get the idea; you can read more about it by clicking on the link.





2. Jack Frost day-- We read about snowmen, made a fun snow globe craft/ writing activity, and made snowmen cheese stick snacks.  We watched Jack Frost and made cute little snowmen tealight ornaments and some cute little snowmen microwave popcorn gifts for family. 



3. Deck the Halls-- We had a day centered around Christmas decorations.  We read The Little Fir Tree and Christmas Tree Memories.  We decorated a gingerbread house, made a fun Christmas tree painting, and wrote directions on how to decorate a Christmas tree.  They even had Christmas tree themed worksheets for math.  This was a "new" Christmas movie for my kids and they thought it was quite funny.

  
4. Grinch Day-  We've had a few of these.... This one year we read How The Grinch Stole Christmas, made Grinch punch and cookies, watched The Grinch movie, made Grinch Ornaments, completed Grinch math worksheets, and used adjectives to describe the Grinch. We even painted some Whoville trees.  


5. Santa Paws and Santa Buddies-  We read stories about Santa; like Turkey Claus and Home for Christmas.  We made Santa acrostic poems, they had Santa math worksheets (plot the grid and roll and cover), and ate Santa hat brownies.  



6. Mr Popper's Penguin-- We found so many cute penguin and snow themed activities we decided to include this movie in our holiday lineup one year.  We made snowball ornaments and snowball cookies.  We painted penguins on an ice flow.   The boys used points on a grid to make snowflakes.  Evan sorted penguin words and filled in penguin addition sentences.  We read books about penguins and enjoyed our day so much. 



7. Olive the Other Reindeer-- We put Santa's reindeer in alphabetical order, did a few reindeer math worksheets, and finished a reindeer word search activity.  They made reindeer ornaments, painted reindeer portraits and drank reinbeer (or rein- cream soda as it ended up being). You'll just have to read about it to understand it!




8. Frosty the Snowman Day--  We could easily make a frosty the snowman day by watching the movie, reading any of the Snowmen books; Snowmen at Play, Snowmen at Night, and/ or Snowmen at Christmas, and making some fun snowmen crafts like these puffy paint snowmen.  



9. The Santa Clause--  We read Santa's Stuck and did up a fun craft/ writing project about what we would do if Santa was stuck in our chimney.  We found a printable Santa math sheet that worked for all three boys' math work for the day and completed some Christmas clay ornaments.  



10. Jingle All the Way--   We read Jingle Bells, Homework Smells, completed a Christmas themed math worksheet and since no one wanted to make a snack or a craft had a pretty short day.  There is a craft & snack idea on the link though.  




Looking for more activity suggestions??  These were some of our favorite book/ craft pairings:

When we read A New Improved Santa and designed a new look for Santa Clause (here). 


We read How Santa Got His Job and filled out applications for the job of becoming an elf; complete with fingerprinting! You can find the links for these ideas here


When when we read Finding Christmas and wrote about the best gift of all. 






Comments

  1. What fun ideas! We will be using several of these over the next few weeks!

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  2. This is so fun and very similar to what we do for our Celebrating the Season tradition (we do an activity, music, movie, etc, too!)

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  3. Love the points on a grid turned snowflake!

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  4. I love that you make December about Christmas, it would be great if more schools took this approach the children would love it and it would increase learning too #FabFridayPost

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    Replies
    1. It really improves our holiday spirit and keeps us learning at a time of the year when we'd be tempted to skip our lessons.

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