It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as Robert Meredith Willson said in 1951. The Christmas tree is up; we put it up on St Andrew’s Day, when I caved to the kids’ request, and steeled myself to not rearrange their delightfully balanced bauble positions. The eagerly anticipated advent calendars have been cracked open; after forgoing the Lego calendars last year, we have returned to them by popular request (aka nagging grandma, which is always a better bet than mom). And, I’m facing up to the reality that I really must get my Christmas shopping done soon. Very soon. Well, soonish. Okay, maybe I’ll just rely heavily on Amazon Prime next day delivery, topped up with a panicked dash around the shops the week before the big day.

So, in addition to our usual workbooks and apps, we’ve been doing some Christmas themed activities from Twinkl.

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Twinkl worksheets, and our Christmas tree!

We’ve done a couple of the Amazing Fact a Day Countdown to Christmas worksheets: Who Is Father Christmas, featuring a fun word search; and Christmas Colours, which is a Maths based colour by numbers Christmas tree.

Our main Modern Foreign Language is Spanish, so we did our Christmas wish lists to Papa Noel with a Letter to Father Christmas Spanish worksheet. (I suggested they put “[mi nombre es] mommy” but they weren’t falling for it at all.)

Our secondary MFL is Mandarin, so we viewed a Celebrating Christmas in China powerpoint presentation. They weren’t particularly impressed that Christmas isn’t a big thing, in China, but they were super excited to learn some of the facts – including that Mandarin is spoken by 960 million people. Helpfully, the couple of Mandarin words were written in Pinyin but I also fired up good ol’ Google Translate so the computer could read the words to them. (Yes, I know it’s a stilted, computerised, voice but it still came out better than my version.)

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Christmas in China Differentiated Activity Sheet, and Paper Fortune Cookies.

We did a Christmas in China Differentiated Activity Sheet, to complement the powerpoint. After writing down some fortune wishes, we made paper fortune cookies. (I know it’s not particularly Christmasy, but it fit the theme.) For those of you with time to spare, there’s full instructions on Twinkl. However, I took the cheater’s route of using preprepared circles and pre-written fortunes, with a Printable Paper Fortune Cookies activity sheet from Alex Brands.

However the festive season is going, I hope it’s treating you well!