10 activities to try this December

Drama

A group of students gets snowed into their school after its winter concert.

What do they do when they discover everyone else has gone home? What are their emotions? Does anything unexpected happen? Does a leader emerge? And what happens in the morning when they find the snow has melted?

English

Listen to Winter from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Use this musical prompt to inspire you to create a piece of writing or poetry about the season of winter.

You could include things like how the music conveys the changing weather (frost, snow, blizzards, etc.) and the look of the landscape, and how the season and/or this music make you feel.

MFL

How do people around the world celebrate at this time of year?

Create a discussion in your language class where students of all cultural backgrounds can join in as you explore the different celebrations across the globe. Students could work together in groups to create a travel guide (in the language they are learning) for visiting these countries during the festive season.

Music

Listen to some Christmas songs and pieces of music and identify the ingredients that tie them to this time of year, e.g., instrumentation, tempo, mood.

Next, see if you can write or create a short seasonal instrumental piece or song featuring some of the sounds and elements you identified.

Geography

Flying across the sky delivering presents is hard work and Father Christmas needs to make some extra stops in your area. He needs:

• a green space or park for his reindeers to rest and graze
• a river or lake for them to drink from
• a supermarket to pick up some more carrots for snacks for them on their journey
• a drive-through restaurant (big enough for a sleigh) for him to get a take-away snack too.

Find these things on a map of your area and work out the shortest route between them all.

DT

Father Christmas is in the market for a new sleigh but what materials would be best?

Students will need to consider the weather and climates that Father Christmas will travel through on Christmas Eve, how/where he will store the presents, how he will be comfortable on his long night’s work etc. Students can sketch their designs (by hand or digitally) and design their prototypes. You could also conduct tests on the sleights to see if they are up to the task, e.g., can they hold enough weight? What happens if they get wet?

PE

Can you dance like a penguin?

Watch videos of penguins to see how they move and consider how they might dance. Work as a class to come up with a few different moves to sequence together into a routine. Then, ask the class break off into small groups to add their own moves or create their own combo. The students could also help you find the best music for the routine too!

Maths

Snowman buttons!

Give children a task to work out a range of multiplication and division questions using snowman buttons. For example, ‘If 3 snowmen each have 5 buttons, how many buttons are there altogether?’ and ‘If there are 30 buttons altogether and 10 snowmen, how many buttons does each snowman have?’ You could encourage the children to consider different ways to solve the problem, for example, creating arrays with buttons/counters.

Science

Salt makes ice melt faster. True or false?

Ask students to agree/disagree and explain their hypothesis. Then work out how to test out their theory. How will their experiment work? What equipment will they need? How will they ensure accurate results? Get them to conduct the experiment, share their findings and explain if they were right or not and why that might be.

Art

Explore different art styles, artists and mediums and ask children to create a winter scene in the style and medium of their choice.

Give example stimulus of different winter scenes and let students decide for themselves how they would like to proceed – supporting and scaffolding as needed. Give them some planning time ahead of the lesson so they can ensure they will have the necessary resources for their artwork (and you can gather things you might not have thought of!). When their work is completed, ask them about their inspiration, why they choose it and explore the mood of feelings of the piece with them.