Instant Early Years Christmas Ideas

In a hurry this Christmas? Looking for easy early years Christmas ideas to use with your 2,3- and 4-year-olds? Create magical memories for your pre-schoolers this Christmas with these fun, festive pre phonics games.

Why include prephonics learning in your Christmas nursery activities?

It’s such an exciting time of year for preschoolers, and practitioners. Our settings are full of Christmas nursery activities and we’re all super busy. But, if we’re not careful, the month of December can become all about Christmas, and less about learning, and we all know that learning is important too.

Simple prephonic activities with a Christmas theme can capture the excitement and the fun of this special time, as well as maintaining step by step progress towards reading readiness.

Which Nursery Christmas activities should we use with our 2,3- and 4-year-olds?

It’s always best to choose nursery Christmas activities that match the prephonic development of your children. For some 2- and 3-year-olds, this might be simple listening, matching and copying games.

For 3- and 4-year-olds, this might include rhythmic, rhyming or alliteration games designed to build phonological or phonemic awareness.

Choosing the best games to play

If you’re wondering where to start with your early years Christmas activities, then this free prephonics progression and assessment tool is just for you!

It includes a super simple map of prephonic development and easy peasy assessment tool. You’ll be taken step by step through to be ready for reading, starting from where they are currently at.

Instantly pinpoint which Christmas nursery activities are best for your 2,3 and 4 year olds by downloading this FREE Download today!

Are there any good books to support these pre phonics early years Christmas Activities?

Yes!

Books provide an amazing start to any prephonic learning because they provide a context and teach pre-schoolers essential prereading skills too.

No matter which developmental stage your children are at, or which early years Christmas activities you pick, there’s a Christmas book for here for everyone!

Super simple Christmas ideas for early years

Here are 3 super simple prephonic Christmas ideas for early years that your 2,3- and 4-year-olds will love. These are games that take very little preparation and are lots of fun to play over and over again.

Instant early years Christmas ideas | The Cheeky Elf

Listen out for similarities and differences in sounds with this cheeky elf game! Ideal for 2 and 3 year olds, your little ones with be encouraged to :

Match and remember character sounds to images
Build vocabulary by naming characters

If you don’t want to play along with the video, you can play with this game with pictures or toys instead. Simply hide the characters, making their associated sounds for the children to guess.

As the children grow in confidence, they can take on the role of making the sounds for their friends to guess. You can also add more characters or extra Christmas sounds such as:

A Christmas cracker
Rustling of wrapping paper
The opening to a familiar song

Instant early years Christmas ideas | Santa’s Noisy Presents

Creeping under the Christmas tree to have a sneaky shake, guessing what’s inside the presents, is a Christmas classic for grown-ups and children! This Noisy Presents game is just like that.

It’s another game where your children will be encouraged to listen and remember the similatiies and differences in sounds.

This is a step on from The Cheeky Elf Game because the sounds are more abstract- they can’t be seen. So, unlike the Cheeky Elf game, your children will really be challenged to exercise their auditory memories.

Always start with using fewer, different sounds, becoming increasingly more similar, with more sounds to match, over time.

What you need

6-8 recycled boxes; ideally these should be a mixture of shapes and sizes.
Sound-making items to go inside the boxes; rice, buttons, old coins, pasta, bells, lentils or paperclips are all good to use.
Wrapping paper to wrap the boxes.
A Santa’s sack to keep the boxes and Santa hats to play in role (optional).

How to play

Prepare for the game by filling pairs of boxes with the same sound making materials.
For example, two boxes containing the same amount of rice, two boxes containing the same number of lentils etc.
When all the boxes have been filled, wrap them using the wrapping paper.
Explain that Santa’s elves have muddled the presents in the workshop, and they are all mixed up inside the sack. Santa needs the children to help organise the presents into matching pairs. They won’t be able to do this by looking, they must do this by listening.
Support the children to take it in turns, listening very carefully.
The first child takes two presents from the sack, giving them a shake to hear the sound inside.
The children must decide if the presents sound the same, or if they sound different.
If the presents sound the same, both presents can be taken out as a matching pair and set aside.
If the presents don’t sound the same, they are both returned to the sack.
Model vocabulary to describe the sounds as the children shake the presents. For example,
“That’s a jingling sound”, “That’s a rattling sound, “That’s a clinking sound”.
Ask children with more developed vocabularies to describe what they’ve heard, explaining how the sounds are the same or different.
Play continues in this way, with the children taking turns, until all presents have been matched.

Instant early years Christmas ideas | Finding Rudolf!

Here’s another super speedy listening game to try, this time involving the difference between loud and quiet sounds.As the children play this easy peasy game of hide and seek, they will know when they’re getting near, or further away from Rudolf, by listening for, and making, simple sound clues.

This awareness of the differences between loud and quiet sounds is really important for phonics later on because some sounds matched to letters can be heard more easily than others.

Happy Christmas

Here’s to wishing you hours of fun with these instantly engaging interactive early years Christmas ideas. With so much learning potential, you’ll be playing and enjoying these every festive season for many years to come.