More Preschool Christmas Lesson Plans: Week 21, Age 3

Three more sleeps, three more sleeps, three more sleeps before we leave for our holiday in Botswana with Granny and Gramps! The energy in this house is palpable. This week we continued with our preschool Christmas lesson plans but I made it real easy on myself by relying on free printables. There are so many great ones available – I chose black and white to save a bit of cash on printing and still had tons of options.

Literacy and Language Arts:

“If All The World Were Paper” was our rhyme from Webbing Into Literacy and we really enjoyed acting it out and wondering about it. The second line is “and all the seas were ink.” It just so happened that it rained on our acting day so we opened the door to the deck and dipped our fingers in our pretend ink sea and used them to write on our papers. Even though the Webbing Into Literacy curriculum had nothing to do with Christmas it was a particularly fun rhyme this week. As a prewriting activity I printed some of the Christmas tracing pages from KidSparkz. They were the perfect level for my girls. We are also still using the story cubes I made for week 17 but this week I redid them to make them Christmas themed by drawing things like Christmas Trees, Santa Hats and Snowmen on the sides of the block.

Cognitive Skills and Math:

For math I printed the girls’ first ever dot to dot from Busy Bee Kids Printables and it was a big hit. We will definitely be doing more of these. We also enjoyed their Christmas mazes, especially the fact that for each maze you could chose the difficulty level that is appropriate for your child.

Science and Nature Studies:

I put a little more effort into science and we made our own icicles to explore the properties of water. We made our molds by wrapping tin foil around the end of a wooden cooking spoon and then we poured water (that we had added food coloring to) into the molds. I thought the girls would love this activity but truth be told they weren’t as into it as I had hoped. They both complained that the icicles were too cold when it was time to unwrap them and once they were unwrapped Boo completely lost interest. Kooks on the other hand had a great time dissolving them in a bucket of water. I got this idea from a fun list of Christmas science activities on eHow.

Play:

There are tons of Christmas printables at Kids Can Have Fun and we really enjoyed working on this cut and paste Christmas Bear. My girls are both still working on their cutting skills and I really liked that this activity didn’t have lines to follow as Boo has started to get upset when she “breaks” the shape she is trying to cut. This was much easier for her but both girls did ask me for help which made me realize how difficult it is to cut with their scissors. It was good timing too because I can now look for better quality kid scissors in Botswana to add to their Christmas stockings.

Thoughts:

We’ve had a lot of fun focusing on Christmas the past two weeks and are now looking forward to some time off. I’m also going to have the opportunity to do some school supply shopping in Botswana and was so thrilled to hear that Air Malawi has increased their baggage allowance for the holidays. I’m hoping to restock on arts and crafts supplies and also build up our library a bit. Just three more sleeps!

• Links to all our age three weekly lesson plans