Christmas
Christmas is obviously a very busy time in school. Between Nativities, carol services, end of term assessments and that pent-up excitement that is difficult to contain in infants, it can be a difficult time to get any work done!
Roleplays
Santa’s workshop is a good roleplay area to help burn off some of that excitement as the children get to roleplay, among other things, making toys (we have toy design sheets) & being Santa. The children also love wrapping all the presents (we have lists of children’s names, different types of wrapping paper & gift tags) and working on correspondences, both letters that have been sent to Santa & replies to children who have written to Santa (we have templates for the latter). Of course, we also have the obligatory elf & Santa costumes.
Our Santa’s Workshop is filled with lots of fine motor and literacy opportunities as well as areas for the children to be creative and use their imagination!
The children have two opportunities to design toys. One design area is on clip boards while there is also a verticle writing opportunity too. There are lots of toy catalogues on offer that the children can use for inspiration for their designs
Our construction area is where the toys that the children design come to life! They have great fun constructing here and you can use any construction toys you have from blocks to stickle bricks, lego and everything in between!
After the presents are made, they need to be wrapped and labelled. There is so much fine motor work here but also estimating and measuring too! Lots of literacy opportunities too!
The last stop in Santa’s Workshop is to check off the naughty and nice lists and make sure the presents get safely into Santa’s sack ready to be delivered on Christmas Eve!
And of course the roleplay wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t have some books to browse and some costumes to add to the imaginations!
The Polar Express
We have also had a ‘Polar Express’ roleplay area. We read the book and let our imagination take us on the journey during Aistear time. We wrote postcards to our parents at home and wrote our lists to Santa. We had picture books to explore on the journey, a train driver and a conductor who had to look after the buying and selling of tickets and make sure that all the passengers had a seat.
Post Office
The post office is another great roleplay area for Christmas. There are so many literacy and numeracy opportunities in this one and you can have a look at mine in more detail here
Our small world for the topic of Christmas gives the children a chance to play out the traditional story of Christmas. In a tuff tray with a wooden nativity set, Mary and Joseph make their way to Bethlehem and the Baby Jesus is born!
I also use my tuff trays for fine motor activities! A firm favourite for Christmas time is decorating Christmas trees!
The tree templates above are part of my Christmas Activity Pack which is available to download from my store. See below for what else is included!
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