Day 7 Montessori-Inspired Christmas Activity: Decking Up The Tree!

Decorating The Christmas Tree

The activity for day 7 is the most famous and traditional activity when it comes to Christmas. But it is the approach that makes it different from the usual. We often see Christmas trees decorated in the preschools, malls and houses and how lovely they look! But if the child is involved in the making of it first hand, it makes a lot of difference with respect to the understanding and skill development. Here is how…

AGE GROUP – 1.5 year onwards

MATERIALS NEEDED

• Small Christmas Tree (I got a 12 inches tree for some 50Rs from a local store)

• Décor items that we used for day 3 activity. I am going to use the same items in some more activities in the next few days.

TIME REQUIRED FOR ACTIVITY PREPARATION – 2 Minutes

HOW & WHAT TO DO

• Take out the mini Christmas tree. It is usually folded up. Demonstrate to your child how to open its branches and let your kid explore and open the branches on their own.
• Put all the decoration items in a bowl.
• Demonstrate how to hang the decoration item onto the tree. Now let your child take over. Let him decide what item to hang where.
• You can continue telling stories and facts about the Christmas tree and decorations while doing the activity to make it even interesting

SKILLS DEVELOPED

• Decision making – which item to pick and place where

• Creativity

• Practical life skills – hanging an item on a tree is a lot for those tiny hands ☺

• Sensorial exposure – touch and feel experience of the tree and decoration items

• Language building – explore and talk about names of characteristics of tree and decoration items, their shapes, colours, textures etc.

• Learning of culture and tradition

CAN SOME MATERIALS BE REPLACED?

If you do not have a Christmas tree, you can use green play dough, make it in a cone shape and decorate it with whatever you have at home, like buttons, gems, bells or any embellishments. If you do not have play dough, you can even make it at home with your kitchen ingredients.

Click HERE to see the recipe http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Playdough-Without-Cream-of-Tartar/

HOW TO TWEAK FOR YOUNGER KIDS 

• From 6 months onwards, you can fill a big bowl with all these decoration items. Let it become a treasure basket and a heuristic play session.

Read more about this HERE http://littleacornstomightyoaks.co.uk/Articles/Treasure_basket

HOW TO TWEAK FOR OLDER KIDS

• You can write names of the items on a paper. If your child cannot read yet, you can introduce these word cards and they can learn it by sight. If your child can read these words, then you can ask your child to pick up a card, read it and pick up that item and decorate the tree. For older kids who are ready to take some grammar lessons, you can have adjective cards as well, like “green”, “small” etc. And the child can form appropriate combinations by lining the word cards side by side. For example – “green tree”, “small bell”.

Explore the entire collection of articles: Christmas & New Year 

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