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Christmas Feels Part One

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I love celebrating Christmas with my class, and last year was the first year in a while that I had a whole class who celebrate Christmas too! In the term three school holidays I put together a Christmas kit of activities that I could whip out in the last week of school... and I was so glad that I did!

The students loved the new activities and were highly engaged in them- surprising as the end of the year can be so rough on tempers. 

It also meant that I could work through the classroom and pack away our usual classroom resources/ activities for the end of the year. The extra time to do this was invaluable!

In the kit was a couple of activities I would put out before school/ Discovery time or throughout the day, a set of Literacy based activities and a set of Maths activities.

This post focusses on the before school activities... below are links to all the resources! I wish I could find my photos, but I will try take some more for you. I've tried to keep costs to a minimum but I did invest some $$ of my own... however, it was totally worth it!

I bought a 90cm/ 4 foot fake Christmas tree from Kmart for $4 and sorted through my Christmas decorations to find some I no longer wanted and stashed them in a basket right next to it. Or you could grab a cheap pack of baubles. The students loved decorating the tree and there was lots of talk about patterning, color choices, sharing etc. The students also understood that they were responsible for removing the decorations for the next person and were surprisingly good at this.

I also purchased a felt tree from The Warehouse. It was meant to roll into a cone shaped tree and had decorations that attached with buttons. I actually cut it in half and stapled them both to the wall. If I did it again, I would just get a second 90cm tree instead. I haven't seen it on their shelves yet this year, but it was similar to this one if you are curious (this is just a random link, I do not advocate buying from them).

I provided a range of Christmas coloring pages that I had collected over the years. Twinkl also has a great selection, and Crayola has some awesome free printables too. Kmart has a coloring roll for $2.50 that looks awesome as well. I love to provide a coloring station for those students who enjoy a quiet activity that can be done independently.

I had a small box of Christmas dress ups (a Santa apron, Santa hat, elf hat, red/green/white scarves, some tinsel, Christmas sunglasses etc) that I have collected over the years. I'll continue to add to it as time goes on.

Finally, I painted a set of Christmas peg dolls for my class and these were the absolute favorite! I love listening to the stories they create as they play with the characters... more in a later post though! 

My students could also get out any of the Christmassy Literacy or Maths activities to supplement these in the downtime before school/ inside lunchtimes/ Discovery play etc.

Looking forward to sharing more ideas with you next time <3


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