A slide show designed to introduce children to Christmas traditions in different countries. The presentation includes interesting facts about each country as well as a set of questions. These can be used to get young learners discussing the topic and comparing the celebrations with their own.

Christmas Wordsearch

A word search containing different names for the ‘gift giver’ that appears at Christmas time around the globe. Some of these gift givers are just like Father Christmas, while others, such as Nisse the gnome, are very different!

After the children have found the words, you could get them to research one of the characters. Encourage children to choose a name, then use books or the web to find out its country of origin

Christmas Poems

A set of Christmas acrostic poem templates for your class to use.

If you choose to do this activity, make sure to model it first. Try creating a mind map of descriptive words to use in the poem. Then as a class, discuss ideas for each line, before writing the best selections on the board.

Once your students understand the concept, let them try a poem on their own. It’s best to use the shorter templates for lower ability children and the longer ones for the more able.

If you feel your class can’t complete the task individually, you could work in mixed ability groups. All you need to do is assign at least one confident writer to each of your groups and ask them to scribe; noting down the ideas of their peers on an A3 version of the poem.

Postcards

Our final Christmas resource is a set of postcards. Simple to cut out andcreate, they’re a great way to encourage independent writing as Christmas approaches.

You can use them in your continuous provision to help foundation stage children practice mark making. Alternatively, they could be used with any age group as a whole class activity.

If you choose to do this, make sure to draw attention to all the features of a postcard as you model writing it in front of the class.

Once again, if you feel students may be better off working in groups, just place your more confident writers with less able children to ensure everyone can contribute to an A3 version of the card.