Christmas Themed Tray Activities for Preschoolers

Happy first day of December!!!  I’ve been away for awhile, busy with life and other extra curricular things… because you know, “it’s that time of the year”.  Anyway, despite of  all the happenings, I was able to assemble these simple Christmas-themed activities for my 4 years old.  My aim here is to simply introduce the meaning of Christmas, the symbols, learning Christmas songs and a little bit of  arts and crafts.  Hope you like these activities!


THE STORY OF NATIVITY

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the story of the nativity.  We are reading two books on this activity (1) The Very First Christmas and (2) The Story of Nativity .  Usually we use our nativity figures as we read the book.  Then we would recap or allow the boys (especially Mavi) to retell the story using the cards and the figures.  I love using these cards.  It’s a great tool for sequencing activity for older kids, but Vito is starting to use them and somehow managed to arranged a few cards in sequence.  Safari Toob has this beautiful nativity set, or the ones from Fischer Price Little People.


CHRISTMAS SYMBOLS AND TRADITIONS

This activity aims to introduce Vito to the symbols of Christmas.  This varies according to your beliefs, tradition and religion.  I am using our cards from our Preschool Literacy Pack, and some Safari Toob Christmas figures.


The book I’m using here is from My First Discovery Series which I think is out of print.


BEGINNING LETTER SOUND

A favourite activity of Vito since our Autumn Themed Activities.  As usual, we’re using Montessori moveable alphabet and the cards from our Preschool Literacy Pack.


COUNTING CLIPCARDS

I always integrate counting in our trays because Vito loves to count.  He would do this activity in the morning before we start reading books as he likes to use the Santa pegs I bought from the local craft store. The counting cards are from Christmas Math Set 2. We are now using the 1-20 counting cards!



12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS COUNTING

We love the 12 Days of Christmas song! We have a book about it and I would sing it to Vito as we read!  He enjoys identifying the images and counting them just like in the song.  So for an extension activity, I printed these cards so we can do a “cards and counters” kind of activity.  This is going to be fun!  You can get the 12 Days of Christmas Counting Cards for FREE from here (FREE 12 Days of Christmas Counting Cards).


CHRISTMAS TREE PINECONES

I saw these beautiful pinecones Christmas trees from Imagination Tree and I knew that we just have to do it.  Here I assembled some pinecones, glue, acrylic paints and jewels from a local craft store so we can decorate our own pinecone.  Let’s see what we can come up with!




MAKING CANDLES

The boys will be making candles this year to give out to their friends. This is so easy to make and the boys love rolling the beeswax!  I purchased the ones in different colors, and they are turning out to be so beautiful!





GINGERBREAD PUZZLE

This is a gingerbread man puzzle that I got from a local craft store and we’ll decorate it so we can use it for puzzle activities.  A great tool for kids to use their imagination and explore their artistic side! Can’t wait for it to finish so we can work on it as a puzzle!


CHRISTMAS LANTERN

Finally, we’ll be making some ornaments to hang in our tree.  A lot of these can be found in Pinterest.  Right now, we’ll be using colored stencils and we’ll add some embellishments later.


And that’s about it!  Hope you like these simple activity trays for Christmas!  Enjoy!