We are in the middle of our 12 Days of Christmas Fun! These activities are done from 9:30-10:30ish each morning. I start out by reading a Christmas book from our collection (our two favorite this year were: Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree & The Legend of the Christmas Tree), then we count down on the pom-pom Christmas tree, and we add an ornament to our Jesse Tree (I’ll post about this soon).
Both boys are doing mostly the same activities. I tried to differentiate my instruction a little bit on a few of these so that all the activities weren’t too easy for ALuv. He still has his regular schoolwork to do each afternoon while MBug and NJoy are resting.
I do have a few activities left over (that we WILL get to-I’ll post about it when we do), but here’s what we’ve done thus far:
Pom-Pom Christmas Trees: I made and laminated these last year. NJoy was enthusiastic at first, but his excitement waned after about 5 minutes. Making Learning Fun has something very similar to this.
He decided the next day he wanted to try them again, especially when MBug showed some interest.
I traced only the outline for ALuv.
I colored in NJoy’s base to give a little extra support
while I left ALuv’s black and white for an extra challenge.
I found a harder puzzle that ALuv and I worked together that afternoon.
NJoy and I talked about each picture, he sequenced, then checked the numbers on the back.
For ALuv, I didn’t include the #4 picture. I asked him to sequence the first three then write, “Now,…” to tell what he thought would happen next.
We did this the same way NJoy did his turkey for Thanksgiving.
while ALuv used a die I found at a local teacher store with number words 1-6 on it.
This was a bit tricky for NJoy to do independently. ALuv didn’t mind jumping in there to help.
As NJoy was gluing all of his down, ALuv began decorating his tree.
Christmas Tree Craft– We decorated pine cones that we picked up at a local park.
First, I glued cotton balls at the base of each to make them stand up straight (looks like snow!) and let them dry.
We drizzled glue onto each tree and shook on the glitter.
Super Easy Christmas Tree Craft
Just in case you’re looking for a simple Christmas tree craft to do that requires very little prep work, try what we did last year. Cut a Christmas tree pattern out of green construction paper. Give your child pieces of Christmas wrapping paper, Christmas cards, pom-poms (really anything crafty you have lying around your house) and let him trim the tree.
Play-Doh Fun
I pulled out all our Christmas cookie cutters and they had some fun with Play-Doh. I made my own dough for this activity and sprinkled in some red glitter. And the boys LOVED it. I hadn’t made my own dough since teaching public school!
I also tried to incorporate a little Christmas tree fun into ALuv’s Word Study in the afternoons.
I found these very cute templates. I used the blank 2 word, 3 word, & 4 word Christmas trees and cut my own “trunks”. I laminated everything FIRST, then wrote the letters/words in permanent marker. This way, I can reuse these before the season is out by “erasing” with rubbing alcohol.
He also used his Nerf dart gun to shoot the words written inside the Christmas trees like we did in this post.
Thanks for joining This Reading Mama on our 12 Days of Christmas Fun, 2011!
~Becky
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