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Christmas Celebration

Each year in my classroom we have a small "program" for the parents. My children are not included in the big kid Christmas music program, so we do our own.

We sing "Jingle Bells" and the kids play musical instruments (which the parents love!) We also do a small play called Five Little Christmas Trees.

Each tree is cut down with an ax and goes off with a happy family. The trees are made of poster board and one child holds it. Another child uses the ax to chop. The other children are the happy families.

We sing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and then Santa comes to visit.

This year we will be doing our Christmas unit for almost 3 weeks. I love to do The Gingerbread Man for an entire week. I have several different versions, many online activities for the Smartboard, and lots of center ideas. The last two weeks we will do Christmas stories and Christmas Around the World.

One of my favorite art activities is to make large Christmas trees from green poster board and put out items for each table to glue onto their own tree. I let them dry and hot glue a trunk onto the tree and then glue the whole tree onto a large used fireworks canister.

I ask each table to decide what they think their tree is worth and we put a price tag on it along with the names of the children who decorated it. We put it up out in the hallway against the wall and add "lights" that we have decorated.

We put up a banner that says "Trees For Sale." It kind of reminds you of Charlie Brown. In the past few years I have actually had parents and grandparents give me money for the trees and have used that money to buy things for the kids.