December is one of the hardest months for teachers. You are prepping for the Holidays in your own home while also trying to make December roll smoothly in your classroom! Making sure you have engaging activities for your preschoolers is important because the excitement of the Holidays affects a lot of student behaviors – the more engaged the better! So, let me share with you some of our favorite December activities in our preschool classroom so you can check lesson planning off your list!
We are going to break these activities into Centers and Lesson Ideas.
Center Activities for December
Art Center & Easel
- Stamping with Cookie Cutters: An easy activity to do at the easel! Just grab some plastic cookies cutters and small trays of paint and let the stamping begin.
- Puffy Paint Gingerbread Houses: Mix equal parts glue and shaving cream, along with some food coloring and you have made your own puffy paint. We like to put the paint in a squeeze bottle for an extra fine motor challenge.
- Painting with Gift Bows: Stick a gift bow to a craft stick and you have a holiday themed paint tool. Children can experiment with the different ways to paint with the bow, yielding different results.
Science Center
- Smell & Guess: Children open the top of old spice containers and smell. Then, they guess what the smell is by looking at the cards on the tray. They can lift the card to see if their guess was correct.
- Holiday Touch Match: Children reach into a box filled with Holiday items and try to guess which item they are touching based on the pictures on the touch mat. Then, they pull it out to see if they were correct.
- Holiday Sensory Bottles: Students can explore the sensory bottle by turning it and shaking it. They are invited to draw what they see inside the sensory tub.
- Magnetic Jingle Bells: Children use a magnetic wand to pick up the jingle bells in a box full of puff balls and jingle bells. They can compare what is magnetic and what is not.
Light Table
To prep this light table activity, find a shallow box lid. Use a screwdriver to poke holes into the lid. Provide children with the small acrylic light bulbs that are used for ceramic trees (we found replacements at our local craft store). Children work to push the light bulbs into the holes and watch as the light from the light table illuminates the light bulbs.
Math Activities
- Jingle Graph Game: This is a fun game where an object is a winner, not a child. This 3-step game is taught during small group and then placed in the math center. Children roll a die, move a game piece around the board and graph the item that was landed on. The goal is to see which item gets filled first.
- Holiday Cover Up: This is a simple game to practice numeral recognition. Give children dot cards to count the number of dots and cover the numeral on the board OR give children numeral cards to work on matching numerals. Play until everything on the board is covered up.
- All Gone Game: This two-player game is great for introducing the concept of subtraction. Each player starts with 10 or more game pieces on their side of the board. Take turns rolling the die and taking off that many game pieces. Whichever side gets rid of the pieces first wins.
- Holiday Bow Size Sort: Gather small, medium and large bows and let children sort them!
Drama Center
We love to incorporate wrapping presents into our Drama Center for the month of December. Lots of problem solving and fine motor work go into wrapping presents. We collect cheap wrapping paper and tape after the Holidays or ask for donations. We use small boxes from the Dollar Tree as to not use as much paper or overwhelm children with the size. We also pre-cut the paper to reduce frustration and waste.
We also like to include a tiny tree with tiny decorations for students to decorate their own tree in the Drama Center. The tree is adhered to a tray because it easily tips. We have a tree skirt, small ornaments, garland and small battery-powered light strands for students to decorate with.
Sensory Tub
The smell of gingerbread helps us get in the Holiday spirit! So, our sensory tub is filled with rice that has been mixed with cinnamon, cinnamon sticks and some puff balls to add color. We also have some scented gingerbread stuffies, a gingerbread ice cube mold and various scoops for students to use in the bin.
Whole Group December Activities for Preschool
- ‘What I See at the Holiday’ Shared Reading: Anytime we can bring in some emergent literacy skills we do! This shared reading focuses on reading simple sentences, noticing aloud how all sentences start the same, matching pictures to print and more.
- Sweet Smells of Christmas: We read the book ‘Sweet Smells of Christmas’ by Patricia Scarry. After reading I have children smell bags and guess which item from the book is in the bag based on using the sense of smell. Check out this blogpost to learn more.
- Dissolving Gingerbread: After reading ‘Gingerbread Baby’ by Jan Brett, I pose the question ‘Why didn’t the gingerbread baby just swim down the river to get away? Then, we place a real gingerbread cookie in water. We make predictions, observe and learn about the word ‘dissolve’.
- Gingerbread 5 Senses: We use our 5 senses to explore a real gingerbread cookie as I write down the words children use to describe the cookie. The last thing we do is taste the cookie!
Table or Small Group Activities
- Gumdrop Structures: This STEM Challenge encourage children to get creative by using gumdrop and toothpicks to create structures.
- Bubbling Gingerbread Men: Place a gingerbread cookie cutter on a tray. Show students how to fill the cookie cutter with baking soda using a spoon. Next, children use a dropper to drop vinegar on the baking soda to see what will happen. You could color the vinegar brown to turn the gingerbread colors too!
- Peppermint Oobleck: Experiment with this odd substance by mixing cornstarch and water in a 2:1 ratio. After the oobleck is created, add some candy canes and pinchers to see what happens to the oobleck.
- Fine Motor Tree: Use a styrofoam tree, some toothpicks cut in half and some teeny tiny ornaments to make this fun fine motor tree. Stick half toothpics around the tree. Students place the teeny tiny ornaments of the tree by placing their hooks on the toothpicks.
- Bridge for Gingerbread Baby STEM: This activity goes great with the whole group activity above called ‘dissolving gingerbread’. Challenge children to construct a bridge for gingerbread baby to use to get over the water. Provide craft sticks, cardboard and blocks. Attach a gingerbread picture to a block and see if the bridge can hold the gingerbread baby.
- Holiday Counting Mix: Students grab a ‘recipe’ card and create their own Holiday Mix by add the correct number of ‘ingredients’. This is a fun way to work on numeral recognition, counting with 1-1 correspondence and working fine motor muscles.
- Gingerbread Playdough: The smell is amazing! Make your favorite homemade playdough recipe but add some ginger, all-spice and lots of cinnamon. Not only is this playdough great for working those fine motor muscles, it’s also a treat to the senses.
I know that you will be on your way to having the whole month of December planned out by snagging some of these December Activities for preschool!
