We started off our Christmas theme with the story of 'The Jolly Christmas Postman' by Janet and Allan Ahlberg and recreated scenes form the book on our small world area with the postman on his bike and all the characters he delivered letters, cards and parcels to on a snowy Christmas Eve.

We thought it looked like hard work for the postman to pedal his bicycle through the snow, so we made some other vehicles for him to use instead. We made sure there was space for the postman to sit and that a sack of post could fit onto our vehicles.

 

All that snow made us feel very wintery and although we couldn't make real snowmen outside, we made plenty inside our classroom!

We made loose parts snowmen and playdough snowmen, filled bottle snowmen with cotton wool balls and did lots of snowy fine motor activities with buttons and sequins, hole punches, fake snow and pipe cleaners and beads......

.......and we decorated our classroom with the snowflakes we had made.

We made igloo homes for polar bears, penguins and reindeer using white Unifix and Multilink cubes or sugar cubes for the walls and Lego boards or whiteboards for the roof. 

 

The story inspired us to create a post office in our role play area and we made a class postbox. Lots of us wrote Christmas cards at home for our friends and posted them in our postbox. 

We designed stamps with ourselves on them. We chose a hat then looked in a mirror and drew ourselves. 

We also wrote very important letters - to Father Christmas!

We started off by finding pictures of things we would like for Christmas and created a wishlist of presents.

Next we wrote our letters, using our best handwriting and remembering to include 'please' and our names.

Finally we were ready to post our letters. We added 6 stamps as 6 was our number this week. We hoped that 6 stamps would help our letters get to Father Christmas quickly!

 

In our RE sessions we learnt about why Christians celebrate Christmas and that it marks the birthday of Jesus. We learnt that this story has a special name - the Nativity.

All of us took part in our Nativity play. We all dressed up, sang songs and did the actions, and did some acting on the stage. We loved sharing our play with our families.

We found out about some Advent traditions at Christmas such as making wreaths, and made our own from playdough, holly leaves, pompom berries and candles.  We all drew around our hands and cut them out to make a wreath for our classroom door too.

We had Advent treats each day in class too to mark the countdown to Christmas.

 

We were very busy making crafts to bring home. These are our cards and stockings. We used our skills of cutting, sticking, hole punching, threading and sellotaping.

We made beautiful Christmas tree cards to take home. We used paper plates, paint, shiny card, sparkly pipe cleaners, felt, gems. snowflake sequins and a lot of PVA glue! 

Inside we wrote messages to our families and coloured in the little fairy lights around the edge of the paper so carefully! 

 

We also covered jars in tissue paper (and a lot more PVA!) to make Christmas jars with a tealight inside. We printed our own tissue wrapping paper and made a label too.

To make snowglobes we dressed up and struck a pose then painted snow onto a laminating pouch and added glitter and our photo before laminating. Once they had been cut out, we completed them by threading through a ribbon and tying it.

 

Even our maths activities were Christmas themed. Our number was 6, as you can see from these photographs!

We also compared numbers to see which amount was fewer and which was more, or if the amounts were the same - equal. 

The Three Bears had a Christmas party and we had to make sure there were the right number of plates, cups, hats, crackers and presents - not fewer than 3, not more than 3!

We even compared how much reindeer food we could fit into different containers, then mixed up our own bag of food to take home to sprinkle outside on Christmas Eve!

We copied repeaing patterns with Christmas bows.........

......and made repeated pattern candy canes with 2 or 3 colours. 

 

A very special guest joined us to help us and show us how to do our activities in the run up to Christmas. We named him Candy Cane and he had lots of fun in the Antelopes class! Trouble was, he was a little bit naughty and usually made a mess! He often appeared after break time while Miss Wheatley and Mrs Chandler were out of the room. Here are some of the things he and his other elf friends got up to!

 

Finally we finished the term with Christmas celebrations! We made reindeer hats to wear to Christmas dinner with our friends, and Candy Cane made one too and joined us for dinner. We had fun at our class party, and even had a visit from Father Christmas who left snowy footprints in our classroom and presents under the Christmas tree!