‘Tis the season to bring the magic of Christmas into your classroom! As the holiday spirit fills the air, it’s the perfect time to engage your students with easy, no-prep math, reading, and science Christmas activities that are both festive and aligned to your grade level standards.
In this blog post, I have a collection of math, reading, writing, and science activities tailored specifically for grades 2-5. There are a variety of activity ideas that require little to no prep as well as many Christmas math, science, and reading worksheets you can use!
Christmas Math Worksheets and Other Math Activities
These are fun Christmas math activities that can be adjusted for your grade level standards. Here are some easy Christmas math activities you can do in your classroom this December:
- Christmas Cookie Perimeter: Have students draw any polygon and decorate it like a Christmas cookie. Then, have them give each side of their polygon cookie a length and have them calculate the perimeter.
- Santa’s Sleigh Word Problems: Create a set of word problems related to Santa’s sleigh and gift delivery. For older students, these word problems can be for elapsed time between deliveries.
- Santa’s Workshop Money Math: Create price tags for various toy items and have students count the amount of money needed to purchase each item, practicing addition and subtraction with money.
- Holiday Graphing: Give students a set of holiday-themed pictures or objects or even show them Christmas advertisements and ask them to graph the occurrences of each item. (Ex: Graph the number of presents, Santas, ornaments, instances of snow, holiday lights, or Christmas trees that you saw in the commercials.) Students can make a tally chart first, and then make it into a graph.
- Christmas Measurement Hunt: Hide various Christmas objects around the classroom and provide students with rulers or measuring tapes. Ask them to find and measure the length, width, or height of each object, practicing their measurement skills.
Practice rounding to the nearest ten or hundred with these fun no-prep Christmas math worksheets that you can find in my TpT store. Students will color the layer of the tree that the middle number rounds to.
Christmas Reading Comprehension and Other ELA Activities
Here are some easy Christmas reading and writing activities you can do in your classroom:
- Book Wrap: Wrap winter or holiday themed read alouds for the month of December. In the days leading up to holiday break, have students unwrap the books and you can read them aloud to your class. Unwrapping a book each day makes the chosen read aloud feel extra special and magical!
- Character Traits: Have students write about the character traits displayed by their favorite characters from holiday books or movies.
- Rewrite: Rewrite the endings of beloved Christmas stories. You can do this as a class or have students write individually. What would happen if the Grinch did not have a change of heart? How would the story change?
- Letter to Santa: In this twist on writing a letter to Santa, have students write a letter to Santa on someone else’s behalf, telling Santa why they deserve to have their Christmas wish fulfilled.
- Write Acrostic Poems: Choose holiday words to have students write themed-poems for. If you student holidays around the world, write poems for each holiday or country you study. You can do this as a class if it is too challenging for your students to do on their own.
- Gratitude Jar: Ask students to write down things they are grateful for during the holiday season on small slips of paper. Collect the slips and place them in a jar as a visual reminder of gratitude and positivity.
- Christmas Fact and Opinion: Provide students with a list of Christmas-related statements and ask them to determine whether each statement is a fact or an opinion. This activity promotes critical thinking and reading comprehension.
- Compare and Contrast Christmas Stories: Choose two different Christmas stories and have students identify the similarities and differences between the characters, settings, and plots of each story.
- This blog post shares a lot of videos you can use as well!
- This blog post shares a fun plate sketch game activity.
The Christmas theme makes for some really fun writing prompts. Your students will love getting a chance to write about Santa’s secret workshop, mischievous elves, or a snowman that comes to life.
Practice reading comprehension with your students with these fun Christmas-themed reading passages. Your students will enjoy reading about the history of snow globes, how to build a gingerbread house, and fun fictional texts as well! The comprehension worksheets are an easy way for you to make sure you are still practicing your standards this holiday season.
You can practice other skills with our no-prep Christmas ELA worksheets.🎅 Christmas-themed cause and effect, nouns and verbs sort, Christmas simile or metaphors, and author’s point of view worksheets are a great way to get students engaged in their work!
Practice reading passages and learn about 🌍holidays around the world with this Christmas Reading Comprehension Escape Room Activity! 🎅Your students will love earning clues that help them save Santa. And you’ll love all the reading passage practice they are getting!
Christmas Science Activities
Here are some Christmas science activities for the classroom:
- Dissolving Candy Canes: Place candy canes in different liquids (water, vinegar, oil) and observe how each liquid affects the candy cane over time.
- Santa’s Sleigh Newton’s Laws: Use a toy or model sleigh and ask students to experiment with different forces to make the sleigh move. Discuss Newton’s Laws of Motion and how they apply to the movement of Santa’s sleigh.
- ☃️Melting Snowman: Place a snowman-shaped ice cube in a tray and provide students with various materials (salt, warm water, etc.) to observe and record what happens as the snowman melts. Discuss the concept of states of matter and the effects of temperature.
- Pine Cone Investigation: Collect pinecones from outdoors. Have students observe and record the differences between open and closed pinecones. Discuss how pinecones respond to changes in temperature and humidity.
You can teach your students about the 🌲Life Cycle of a Christmas tree using my Christmas Science worksheets. Included is a reading passage with comprehension questions, a spinning life cycle wheel, plus posters.
My Christmas Science Worksheets resource includes so many fun worksheets to practice science skills while sticking with a holiday theme! Learn about reindeer, penguins, Christmas trees, practice states of matter and so much more.
Practice animal adaptations and scientific causes and effects with the Adaptations of Reindeer poster and cause and effect science worksheet. Students will refer to the poster to match the causes with the effects.
I hope these activities help you incorporate the fun holiday season into your regular math, science, reading, and writing standards!
Need some ideas for easy classroom Christmas crafts?
Looking for easy & inexpensive holiday gift ideas for your students?
