Christmas Fun

Christmas Special ? Year 3

Introduction

The Christmas special offers a selection of websites and other Christmas activities ranging from word games to making Christmas cards, one of which uses a Word file (file supplied Christmas Special Y3X2).  Some on-line sources of free Christmas clip art are included.

Activity 1 ? Christmas wrapping paper

Children can create Christmas images with a  paint package and either use the tiling facility (if it has one) or put the drawing into Textease and use the background tiling facility to produce Christmas wrapping paper (see attached file Christmas Special Y3X1 for an example).

Activity 2 ? Christmas Word Star game

This game is a bit like Hangman.

http://www.squiglysplayhouse.com/Games/WordStar/index.html?Christmas

Activity 3 ? Create a personalised Christmas story

Children can create personalised stories by entering a few details about the names of friends, pets etc.  These are then incorporated into a printable story.

http://www.northpole.com/PersonalizedStories/

Activity 4 - Retell the Christmas Story

Use the MAPE Big Book Maker to retell the story of Christmas for younger children.

http://www.mape.org.uk/kids/BookMaker/bookmaker.htm

Use a digital camera to take photographs of the class dressed for the Nativity play to illustrate the story. Children could read the story aloud and add this to the Big Book.

Activity 5 - Compose a Christmas jingle

Use a program such as Compose World Junior (ESP) to make a Christmas jingle. Choose different themes. Each theme should have different characteristics.

Angel music may be gentle and sweet.

Christmas disco music would be noisy and fast.

Children can listen to each other's music to see if they suit their theme.

Themes could include, The Christmas Tree, Sleighing, The Snowman, Silent Night, Santa?s Sleigh, or Angels.

Activity 6 - Christmas Acrostic

Ask children to think of a suitable Christmas word. Get them to type the letters for the word into a word processor program using a new line for each letter, for example,

S

A

N

T

A

Children should now finish the acrostic poem by writing a line of poetry for each letter. They can then reformat the poem (for example, making the initial letter a different colour, style and size) and add some suitable clip art.

Activity 7 - Sorting Game ? The seven dwarfs

There are two Christmassy sorting games on the Naace primary website (Dwarfs and Fairy Stories):

http://www.mape.org.uk/kids/sorting_games/index.htm

Children can work in pairs to play the game and then make a game.  This involves formulating questions.

Activity 8 ? A Christmas painting or gift tag

Children can use a suitable painting program to create pictures of snowmen, stars, Christmas trees etc.  Many of these can be created using basic shapes (rectangles, circles, triangles) available from the polygon tools.  Children will need to be able to flood fill.  If the images are small they could be printed onto thin card and cut out to make gift tags.

Activity 9 ? A folding Christmas card

The attached Word file contains a template and instructions for making a folding Christmas card.

Activity 10 - A Christmas scene as a stained-glass window

Children can use Christmas clip art as the basis for a stained glass window painting.  Load the clip art into a paint package and use flood fill to colour, dividing large areas of colour into smaller sections using a medium sized black brush.

Alternatively children could create a black and white stained-glass window for a friend to colour.

Christmas Clip Art

Some black and white Christmas clip art icons can be found at http://www.mape.org.uk/ see the Downloads section on the Classroom Activities page. 

Other Christmas clip art can be found at:

http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/xmas/clip1.html