Christmas is such a joyous time to work with young children. It is a busy and exciting time of year. The seasonal magic and anticipation provide plenty of opportunities for creative activities and celebrations to support progress in children’s essential development in language, communication and literacy. We’ve listed 12 fun Christmas activities for EYFS which are easy to implement in any classroom or setting.
Each EYFS Christmas activity is explained in a short video (approx a minute each in length) and includes ways to easily implement the activities in your classroom or setting. 12 activities at your fingertips to help children in their learning as the excitement of the season builds.
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EYFS Christmas Activities For Communication And Language Development
Each of the Christmas activities below centres around simple and creative activities to do with your class that also improve their communication and language development. The activities give the opportunity for modelled language and oral rehearsal while building on a range of topics, traditions and celebrations related to Christmas time.
1. Elf on the shelf
No festive season would be complete without an elf on the shelf! Children love seeing where the elf will jump to next, and this gives plenty of opportunities to create stories around the elf’s progress. In this example, we share some of the ideas you could implement in your classroom and how Chatta boards can build communication development opportunities around the elf’s adventures.
2. Exploring Christmas cards
This video explores how each Christmas card that arrives in the class can develop language and engage the whole class.
3. Christmas gift list activity
You can have great fun creating Christmas gift lists with your class – whether that’s for themselves, for their friends, or even a character from a book.
4. Christmas carols activity
Many subjects give rise to great opportunities to create digital talking postcards to share with families. Any songs that children love at Christmas can be recorded with Chatta – great fun for both in the classroom or setting and for sharing with parents and carers. What are your favourite Christmas songs?
5. Decorating the Christmas tree
There are very few activities filled with as much tradition as decorating the Christmas tree. This exciting activity for young and old gives an excellent opportunity for modelled language and oral rehearsal. Questions such as ‘Where do the baubles go? Where does Santa leave the presents? What goes on the top?’’ provide excellent opportunities for the use of positional language.
6. The nativity story
Chatta is perfect for helping children re-tell any story, and none more so than the nativity story. Creating a Chatta board with images showing key events/characters allows a teacher to explain the sequence in a manageable way making it easy for children to retell it.
7. Describing snow
Snow provides the perfect opportunity to create descriptive Chatta boards to widen the children’s vocabulary and introduce new words.
If there’s a snow day, then the children’s activities can be used in Chatta boards the following day. If there’s no snow, you can create Chatta boards to show the children the many different activities that can be enjoyed when the snow falls.
8. Describing reindeer
Many of the children will have only seen reindeer in films – this gives an excellent opportunity for a descriptive activity that explores what reindeer are like and to introduce new words. What do they look like? What do they eat? We can use descriptive phrases such as ‘reindeer are brown furry animals, they have long antlers, etc.’
9. Making reindeer biscuits – Christmas craft activity
This video shows you how any Christmas craft activity can become a chance to model instructions – first, then, next.
The activity is creating delicious reindeer biscuits, but the approach can be replicated by creating a Chatta board with any Christmas craft activity. This is great for helping to consolidate learning from both the activity and the discussion around the Chatta board afterwards.
10. Planning Christmas dinner
What would you put on your Christmas menu? Decide with your class. By adding images of the foods, you can explore them with your class. Not all of them will be popular (who in the class doesn’t like Brussels sprouts?), but the conversation gives an excellent opportunity to explore familiar and new items and expand their vocabularies and appetites!
11. Describing Father Christmas / Santa
Another great Christmas tradition to describe is Santa. His bushy white beard. His bright red coat. This describing activity is great to involve everyone in describing one of their favourite Christmas characters.
12. Planning a Christmas party
This activity explores planning your Christmas party with your children. Who will you ask? What will you eat? What will you do to make the party sparkle? The party plans can be recorded through the Chatta software and shared with the children both in the class and at home, giving an excellent opportunity to involve parents and carers with the activities that day.
We hope you enjoy these Christmas activities, and if you know of any activities we’ve not listed here, tweet us @hellochatta or share your Christmas activity in the Chatta community.
You can download the software and trial it for free by visiting https://app.chattalearning.com/
