Activities to do at home

• ‘Christmas cookie baking’ - The Christmas cookie is always irresistible, with a nice brown crunchy texture, colourful icing on top, and a tempting sweet smell from the oven. If you can gather the ingredients and already have the equipment (i.e., oven), it is recommended for you and your child to bake it from scratch.  Baking is a good opportunity for your child to explore the texture and the relationship between the ingredients, practice using measurement tools and weighing, and develop fine motor skills like pouring and mixing. You may check out some online resources for recipes: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/9870/easy-sugar-cookies/
   
• ‘Christmas ornaments hunt’ - Children enjoy the excitement of finding treasures, and the shiny colourful ornaments are a good fit to pretend to be treasures. You can prepare a few ornaments, place them around a room/home, and ask your child to look for them. To facilitate the learning (e.g., prepositions, verbs, and the name of common items), during the ornaments hunt, you can support your child by commenting on your child’s actions, e.g., “Is it under the pillow?”, “You are lifting the blanket.”, “Oh! You found it! It is on the shelf!”. For the children who are older and require less support, you can draw a simple outline of the environment, and create a ‘Treasure Map’ for your child to follow. If more children are attending the activity, you can pair up two in a team, with one child giving the instructions to another child (i.e., who cannot look at the ‘Treasure map”) so he can arrive at the location of the ornaments.
   
• 'Christmas shaker (musical instrument for Christmas carols)' - Christmas carols are one of the most popular melodies among children, they love to sing and dance along to the music, and a shaker is a good musical instrument for them to dance with, it is easy to make and suitable for children of all ages. You can prepare a clean and dry container with a lid, such as plastic bottles, or small metal containers. For the contents inside the container, you can prepare anything hard and small enough to fit into the container, such as beans, rice, beads, pasta, etc. Also, you can make use of the opportunity to encourage your child to practice fine motor skills by preparing some utensils for them to scoop/ put the contents into the containers, e.g., spoons with different capacities (i.e., big and small), chopsticks, and tongs. For the children who require more support, you can provide more vocabulary by commenting on their actions or describing the content they are interacting with, e.g., “You are picking up the big bead.”. For the children who require less support, you can guide them in investigating the features of different content, and observing the difference of sounds when changing the ingredients, e.g., “How does it sound like when it has  beans/ rice/pasta?”
   
• ‘Christmas tree decoration’ - Decorating a Christmas tree is a wonderful activity for everyone to join in. In Hong Kong, it may be challenging to keep a  Christmas tree at home, however, we could still be festive and celebrate by creating a 2D Christmas tree at home. You can prepare a small area such as a part of the wall or window, and use colour tapes to outline the shape of a Christmas tree. Afterwards, you can prepare some tinsels and invite your child to pick out decorations such as small toys such as figurines or shapes and stick them on the ‘Christmas tree’.

We hope you and your children enjoy this month’s activities and themes. Thank you for your continued support! 

There are some great books to go with our December theme. Look out for:

• ‘Polar Express’ by Chris Van Allsburg
• ‘Dream Snow’ by Eric Carle
• ‘Maisy’s Christmas Tree’ by Lucy Cousins
• ‘Santa’s First Christmas’ by Mac Barnett
• ‘The Christmas Tree Mouse’ by Joseph Coelho
• ‘That Christmas and Other Stories’ by Richard Curtis