Christmas Themed Math Activities

December 16, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

If we can do Christmas themed language arts activities, we can do Christmas math, too.

Kindergarten Worksheets and Games has a bunch of printable math worksheets for younger kids, including skip counting, greater than/less than, I-spy with counting and more, all with a winter/holiday theme.

Mashup Math has some Christmas-themed math riddles for kids to try. Think logic puzzles where kids have to figure out how many there are of something or how much something costs based on the clues in the word problem.

Little Bins for Little Hands has a great collection of free printable Christmas related math activities. You’ll find Grinch themed graphic, a Santa dice rolling game, playdough mats with counting activities, secret word math puzzles and more.

Older kids can use these ideas from Make Sense of Math for some holiday-themed math learning. Solve problems with a snowball fight, plan a holiday meal or use problem solving on holiday themed puzzles. Some of these ideas involved paid products you can find here.

Speaking of paid resources, this holidays around the world math pack from Amanda Stitt at Teachers Pay Teachers looks like a lot of fun for middle schoolers. It includes information about different winter holidays (such as Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali and Los Posadas) and how they are celebrated around the world, with math skills integrated into the lessons. For example kids can determine the average temperature around Christmas in Australia, which country has the most people who celebrate Kwanzaa, or solve a word problem to discover how much money the children were gifted for Lunar New Year.

Teaching with Kaylee B has more paid printable math activities good for elementary school kids. I love the “Don’t Eat Pete” game, which is a way to practice math facts (and eat a little candy) you can do throughout the year, but this one has holiday themed clip art to make it a fun Christmas math game.

Next Plan Idea:

Christmas Language Arts Activities

Have you read?

Sun Activities for Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

Leave a Reply