Mini Preschool: Christmas: Games/Activities/Movement

I was in charge of preschool today. And I had a few activities planned that I thought would be good, but I felt like things didn't really come together as I had planned in my mind, so I was a bit disappointed with the whole thing.

My category was games/activities/movement. The first thing we did was I gathered the kids together on the

 floor in the living room and gave each child a mini-book I'd printed out off of DLTK's website (I find a lot of great resources on this website btw) that told the story of the ginger bread man. We read the story together, and then I gave each child 4 flash cards that had pictures of different parts of the story, and I had them help me put the pictures in order of how they happened. I thought this activity went well. It seemed like it was a good difficulty level, and the kids had fun and liked having their own books to follow along.

For the second activity, I split the kids up into two groups. The first group did a Christmas tree activity. I had Aaron draw me two Christmas trees on poster board with blank spaces for ornaments. Each of the ornaments was a different shape (circle, square, triangle, etc.) and the kids had to pick an ornament off the side and put it in the right place on the tree. Shape matching. This activity was way too easy for all the kids, and they accomplished it in about 3 seconds flat.

The second group went into the kitchen, where I had strung Christmas lights onto my washer and dryer. They had to take clothes pins that I'd painted different colors and clip the clothes pin next to the color of Christmas light that it matched (red to red, blue to blue, etc.). This activity was also way too easy, and didn't take up the time I'd anticipated that it would. When each group was finished with their activity, then we traded.

After that we came back together as a big group. I showed the kids a jingle bell and talked about how a jingle bell is a type of instrument and that you play a jingle bell by making the little ball inside of it vibrate against the sides. I showed them how if I held the jingle bell tightly it would stop the vibration and the bell wouldn't make noise. Then I gave each kid a jingle bell of their very own (dollar store, 9 bells for $0.80, can't beat that!) and we played a gave where I'd have them hold the jingle bell in different places (above their head, behind their backs, etc.) and shake it really fast and really slow. We shook our bells while we spun around in circles. Then I put on the song by Transiberian Orchestra called A Mad Russians Christmas, which has slow parts and fast parts. I encouraged the kids to shake their bells slowly during the slow parts, and as fast as the could during the fast parts. We also danced around the room. But whenever I stopped the music, everyone had to freeze until the music started again. I think this was probably the favorite activity.

For our last thing, we did candy cane races. I gave each kid a candy cane and a shishkabob stick (don't worry, we cut the pointy ends off). The game was to hold the stick in both hand and hook the candy cane in the middle, and balance the candy cane while running between the stair cases at each end of the building. The kids did great, and were very funny to watch. Then I let them eat their candy canes for a treat.

And that was it. The whole thing took about 30 minutes. Oops. My bad. I guess when it's my turn again I'll have to do a time trial first. I felt really bad, since usually preschool is supposed to be about an hour.