The Christmas holiday is almost upon us and the excitement is palpable throughout every corner of the school. The festive period and the break that comes with it should be a time for relaxation, recharging, and reminiscing on all we’ve done throughout the year. It’s an important holiday for spending time with family and friends—especially for children to catch up with relatives they don’t see very often.
In the spirit of the season, we’ve put together a list of Christmas activities for children during school holidays that can be sent home as homework over the break. We’ve selected school holidays kids activities that can be carried out with other adults as well as individually to encourage children to involve others around them at home in their learning. These festive-themed kids school holidays activities and tasks are bound to go down a treat, and might not even feel like homework at all!
Make Christmas activities for kids on school holidays more fun by ensuring your students have lots of festive craft materials to work with. Our Christmas Craft Compendium is ideal for this with a selection of pom-poms, glitter, mosaic shapes, pipe cleaners, and more.
Here, you can find school holiday activities for kids to cover literacy, numeracy, and science topics, but many of these overlap with creative tasks and research about the world around us. If you need help coming up with activities, games, challenges, and other fun ways to get through the last days before Christmas, take a look at our guide for Christmas activities in the lead up to the holidays.
Literacy
Our top literacy activities for children in school holidays will get children practising their writing skills and are a great opportunity to test their retention of topics you’ve covered in the last term.
Write a Thank You Letter to Santa
This is a good activity for practising letter-writing and handwriting skills.
Ask the students to each write a letter to Santa to say thank you for their presents after Christmas Day. Have each student describe what they got and what they liked the most. Encourage them to write about what they’ve been up to over the holidays as well.
To provide the children with prompts, you could send them home with a letter from Santa which covers all the things he’d like to hear about, such as what foods they’ve eaten, who they’ve seen, whether they helped out with the Christmas dinner, and whether there were any sightings of the Grinch. Address the letters to the North Pole:
Santa Claus
123 Elf Road
North Pole
88888
Christmas Pen Pals
This activity takes letter writing to the next step by getting children to try out the postal system. Some of your students might be familiar with how to send letters, but this activity will give them autonomy over each step of the process.
Organise the class into pairs and task each person in each pair with writing a Christmas card and sending it to the other. You could make this a little more creative by asking the children to make the Christmas cards they send. We offer all sorts of different Christmas card craft packs and templates, including Christmas Cutout Cards, Christmas Pudding Cards, and Happy Christmas Cards that can be customised.
If you’re holding a Christmas classroom party, this is a great opportunity to get make sure pan pals know their partner’s address and what they want to hear about in their letter.
How is Christmas Celebrated in Another Country?
For this activity, each child should research and write a report on how Christmas is celebrated in a different country.
You could assign specific countries to the students or ask them to choose one of their own. Here are some cultural Christmas facts to get you started:
- In Japan, it’s traditional to order KFC on Christmas.
- In Austria, Krampus is on the lookout for naughty children to kidnap!
- In Australia, having a Christmas BBQ on the beach is completely normal.
Science
Here are three festive ideas for kids activities during school holidays that get little minds thinking about science. We cover biology and chemistry in these fun homework tasks that will have children looking at Christmas through a scientific lens.
Observe Wildlife in Your Garden
While looking out for Santa flying overhead, your students could also spend some time observing the wildlife in their garden. This task could start with a lesson in class about what types of animals come out in the winter. Talk about hibernation and explain what some animals do during the winter. What about birds? Which birds migrate during the cold months?
Ask your students to spend some time observing which animals and bugs come into the garden. If they don’t have a garden, perhaps they could visit a park nearby with an adult.
In the winter there is less food around for birds to eat. You could make this activity more fun by tasking the students with creating a birdhouse or a bird feeder of their own. Our paper mache birdhouses can be painted or covered with decorations to make them unique or disguise them well.
Follow a Christmas Recipe
Your students will get excited about the science of cooking when they follow a Christmas recipe. This activity should be carried out with adult supervision. You could supply a recipe such as one for gingerbread biscuits as part of the task, or ask the children to come up with their own.
Each student should write a report on their Christmas cooking experiment, observing how the ingredients were affected by different stages of the process. Things to include could be:
- Which ingredients can be combined but not separated afterwards?
- What happens when the ingredients go into the oven?
- What happens when you mix different flavours or food colourings?
- How long will food stay fresh after cooking and what should you do to keep it fresh?
Experiment with Snow (or Ice)
Get kids thinking about the changing states of matter with this fun science experiment by challenging them to keep a snowball from melting for the longest time (if we don’t experience a white Christmas, an ice cube will do!)
In this experiment, each student must try to keep a snowball or ice cube from melting for as long as possible. The only rule is that they can’t put it in the fridge or freezer. Start the kids off on this experiment by thinking about what affects the state of ice and snow. How can you keep an ice cube cold for a long time? Think about different environments—which room in the house is the coldest? What materials could you wrap an ice cube in to keep the warm environment from affecting it?
Have each student write a report on their experiment. Perhaps they could use five snowballs/ice cubes and put them in different situations, then compare which was the most effective at the end.
Numeracy
Here are some Christmas school holiday activities for children that won’t feel too much like homework and let them enjoy the Christmas spirit!
Draw a Symmetrical Christmas Tree
Challenge the students to draw a perfectly symmetrical Christmas tree, complete with decorations that match on each side.
This activity will need to be completed on squared paper using a ruler and a protractor to make sure the lengths and angles of each side are the same. Make the task more challenging by adding these requirements:
- The tree must have three tiers of branches on each side.
- The tree must have two circle decorations, two square decorations, and one hexagon decoration on it.
- Each half of the tree must be reflected exactly on the other side (this means they’ll have to put the hexagon in the exact middle).
Identify Shapes on the Christmas Tree
As an activity for younger children, or a warm-up to the above, task the students with making observations of their Christmas tree and the shapes of the decorations on it. This activity could involve counting the decorations and sorting them into different shape groups.
The kids could use a key to identify shapes that are 2D and those that are 3D. The decoration shape report could be accompanied by some photos or drawings of examples of the decorations.
Sorting and organising shapes by looking for the key distinguishing features is great practice for little ones to learn about different shapes and symmetry. We offer a fun 2D shape sorting game collection called Sort It which helps children identify shapes by their attributes. Start students off with some practice runs before sending them home to test their knowledge of different shapes.
Christmas Maths Worksheets
Math Salamanders: these Christmas worksheets are free to download and cover a range of KS1 and KS2 activities for kids school holidays like counting, connecting the dots, puzzle sheets, and other activities. You can also find a list of maths games here that are useful for classroom time too.
Primary Resources: find a huge selection of Christmas maths activities for kids during school holidays as well as for lessons on this website. All of the resources are free to download and range from whole lesson plans to worksheets that can be printed out and copied—ideal for sending home as maths homework. Most resources specify which year group they are appropriate for.
Are you on the lookout for kids activities school holidays worksheets for other subjects over Christmas? Take a look at our article The Only Christmas School Activities Worksheets You will Ever Need. We also cover a range of quickfire activities to do on the very last day of school before the holidays.
