Christmas Activities for Kids
It is time to start having some holiday fun! Here is a round up of all of my favorite Christmas crafts, sensory bins, snacks, and activities that I have done throughout the years. I hope you can grab some ideas!
Christmas Sensory Rice
For this bin, I dyed rice red and green and threw in some scoopers and cookie cutter shapes. Click here to read how to make your own sensory rice.
Christmas Sensory Bin
This bin is was so much fun! I got all the supplies inside from the Dollar Tree. I love how festive it is!
Christmas Snow Bin
A simple snow bin is always fun during the month of December. You can get “instant snow” from Amazon, or you can just use cold baking soda (pictured).
Christmas Shape Trees
These are one of my favorite Christmas tree crafts. Cut strips of green paper into 10 different sizes strips. Students order the strips on their paper first, then glue. Then decorate! Some years, I’ve had them decorate with all kinds of materials. In the photo, I had them use foam shapes. I love how they turned out!
Reindeer Snack
Such a cute and easy snack for a fun Friday activity or a Christmas party. To make these, just grab some graham crackers, icing, pretzels, and M&M’s.
Christmas Tree Symmetry Painting
These paintings are easy and kids love seeing the final product! Cut several different sizes of large triangles and provide the paint. We used eye droppers instead of paint brushed for this activity. Students drop different dots of paint, fold, smooth, and unfold to dry.
Cardboard Christmas Ornaments
Have you heard of Kwik Stix? They are a must have in the classroom and at home! I used holiday cookie cutters to make different shapes from recycled cardboard boxes. I used a razor cutter to cut them out, but heavy duty scissors would work. Students used their paint sticks to decorate the cardboard cut-outs. Once they dried (which only takes about 60 seconds with Kwik Stix), I punched a hole at the top and added string. Click here to read the full tutorial.
Christmas Tree Cookie Cutter Printing
Cookie cutter prints are MY FAVORITE activity. So easy to set-up! If you own the holiday pack of cookie cutters, you have so many options! Add paint and have kids dip and stamp the prints onto cardstock. These would be perfect as DIY wrapping paper or DIY Christmas cards.
Class Christmas Tree
Much like our Turkey Classroom Door from November, students all create their own mini tree (green paper cut into triangle). Once the individual trees are dry, you can configure them to create a larger class tree.
Christmas Play Dough Tray
I made a large batch of green play dough and added different loose parts into our veggie tray turned play dough tray (from the Dollar Tree). Add tree shaped cookie cutters and let kids create their own Christmas trees!
DIY Santa Christmas Ornaments
Last Christmas, I made these with my boys as their gift to grandparents. I bought the wooden ornaments from a craft store and we used Kwik Stix to paint “Santa” on the front. I did the final part with the eyes and nose since I used a glue gun to make sure they lasted. These would make a great parent gift for Christmas. I love mine!
Christmas Picture Books
Although its very hard to narrow this list down to five books, I tried to pick my top 5 Christmas read alouds for the month.
•Bear Stays Up For Christmas by Karma Wilson
•Turkey Claus by Wendi Silvano
•The Hat by Jan Brett
•There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell by Lucille Colander
•Snowmen at Christmas by Caralyn Buehner
Click here to read a post with descriptions on each book.
Need visuals and comprehension questions for story time? Be sure to check out my story time packs! They are loaded with the visuals needed to go over the key details in each book, plus interactive WH questions to have your students answer after reading!
Christmas Easy Art and Writing Activities
December’s Easy Art pack includes 12 fun crafts for students to do. I think these reindeer are my favorites for the month! All easy art packs include prep plans, easy print sheets, picture visual direction cards, whole page NO PREP step by step visuals to pull up on any device, differentiated writing pages for the 12 Easy Art activities.
Corresponding writing pages are perfect for students to complete at a daily writing center. I also have Holiday Sentence Builder activities you can use for writing to help students build and write complete sentences.
Christmas File Folder Activities
As you know, I have a file folder obsession. When I was in the classroom, I love using my Christmas math and reading during station time and independent work time.
Click here to read about independent work stations.
Click here to read about how I ran math stations.
Christmas Felt Activities
Oh Dollar Tree, how you never fail me! I got these felt activities from the Dollar Tree years ago, added some velcro and voila, we have more independent work tasks!
Christmas Independent Work Tasks
In my self-contained classroom, we created seasonal tasks with items from the Dollar Tree to add onto our rotation of workboxes. Since I worked with little ones, there were always lots of put-in tasks, color sorting tasks, and sorting by size/shapes. Click here if you want to see more Christmas workbox ideas.
New to workboxes? Here are a few blog posts for you:
Click here for post with tons of examples of put-in tasks
Click here for a post on color sorting tasks
Pin these ideas for later!
I hope everyone has a wonderful month and restful BREAK!
*Please note: Some of the links included in the post are affiliate links. This means that if you click on a product link, I may receive compensation. Compensation through the affiliate links comes at no additional cost to you. All products listed are items I have purchased and use personally.