For my December week of preschool, we focused on the ‘Santa’ etc. aspects of Christmas. Here are some ideas for you.
We started the lesson with a book of course. (I ALWAYS start with a book. It connects reading to everything else. Children who love reading = good readers = smart children.) I don’t remember exactly which book, but it was one of the classic Christmas stories like Up On The Housetop or Jolly Old St. Nicholas or something. This is to introduce them to Christmas traditions and our Christmas culture.
The girls used Christmas shaped cookie cutters to dip in red, green and ‘gold’ (yellow) paint. This is a printing technique which is a process art activity. (I’ll have to get on my soap box about that one some day.) They had a blast.
They put ‘sprinkles’ (glitter) on them while they were still wet, just for a little ‘bling.’ Little girls love bling – especially glitter. Gave it an extra punch of fun for them.
After their art activity, they had snack: a simple ambrosia salad, complete with marshmallows (a Christmas treat since we don’t often use sweets in preschool.) (This is a super-easy snack – mix canned fruit with mini marshmallows and acini di pepe - those tiny little pasta balls, and that’s it! No other sugar or whipped cream is needed.)
After that we did our letter activity. The letter was R, so we did a ‘Reindeer’ activity. Each girl received two letter ‘R’s and a die cut of a reindeer (cut on my cricut machine.) We talked about the letter R and how Reindeer started with it and I modeled the instructions to glue one R in the box and one in front of the word ‘eindeer’ to complete it and we talked about how the letter R completed the incomplete word. Then of course, they got to decorate their reindeer. Click on the image of the handout to download it.
Our final activity was to make snow. This was a huge hit with the kids when I was teaching kindergarten and of couse, the girls loved it too. This is just simple snow powder from Home Depot – it comes in a little tin.
Put a teaspoon of the powder in a bowl for each child.
Add the correct amount of water. Stir it up.
And play! (Remember, play is a child’s work.) This is such an awesome sensory activity.
Here are a few bonus ideas:
On our other preschool day, the shape was a star and we were still doing Santa, so we made these adorable Santa stars, adapted from an idea I saw somewhere on the WWW. Feathers, yarn, a pompom, wiggly eyes, batting some triangles and a rectangle make for a very cute Santa star ornament.
I came up with a really fun idea for our snack. Had I prepared it better ahead of time, I would have used cute Christmas bowls, but alas, I didn’t. It was still fun though. I put little bowls of snack foods (again, with a little Christmas treat) on a lazy susan and let the girls make their own snack mix. They got to add the Christmas M&Ms and that made it really cute and festive.
And this last idea is from the Preschool Christmas Party at one of the other mom’s houses (Thanks Jana!)
The girls made snowmen out of mini chocolate chips, frosting, hershey’s kisses, fruit by the foot (scarf) & pretzels. A toothpick is holding the snowman together. How adorable right?!
Hope you enjoyed these activity ideas and can use them. I’m sure they can be adapted to other things as well. Please let me know if you find this useful.
Merry Christmas in March!!
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