Christmas is a crazy time to be in the classroom. These 5 Christmas STEM activities will help you keep your students on task and learning, even after all the candy canes have been eaten.
Why I think you should do Christmas STEM activities in your classroom
Your students are jumping out of their skin for the Christmas holidays, right? Introducing some hands on logical thinking tasks will make that transition to Christmas a whole lot smoother.
There are several types of Christmas STEM activities you could use.
#1 – Christmas Toy Design STEM activity.
This is a STEM project that you could work on over a week or two. Students need to search the room for all the information about Christmas toys and then design and engineer their own toy. The good thing about this type of Christmas activity is that it is open ended. Meaning, students can work on it at their own ability and continue to develop their design. With the planning templates included students can also work autonomously (while the teacher tries to finish those final corrections or tries to tidy the room for the Christmas break).
#2 – Christmas STEM activities for junior students.
What I like most about these activities is that they provide an entry point to STEM activities where young students can practice their fine motor skills of cutting, gluing and building. These task cards also include basic visual prompts which I think is awesome for any pre-reading students you might have. I have used these task cards with ages 4 to 8.
#3 – Christmas Binary Coding Unplugged.
If the thought of coding scares you off, well just think of it as secret messages, because that is exactly what it is! Once you take away the technology side of things, coding is just understanding secret messages. These unplugged Christmas STEM activities are great at Christmas time because they can just be printed and worked on straight away. There’s also an option for students to code their own messages which keeps this as an ongoing task in the classroom. This activity usually lasts my class a few days.
#4 – Create a board game
The best thing about this STEM activity is that you can use it for any subject area. We all know that Christmas is a time to spend with family. My family (well mostly me, the others are under duress) like to play board games during holidays. Why not get your students to create their own? It could be based on a topic you have covered or just a fun Christmas board game for the entire family.
#5 – STEM Makerspace choice boards.
When students have a choice in what they do, they do a better job and they stick to the task for longer. This Christmas, let your students have a choice which STEM activities they complete with the STEM and Makerspace choice boards. This set comes with 96 different choices, including a themed Christmas choice board!
More Christmas Classroom Inspiration
When I see what other teachers do in their classrooms I get so much inspiration. So when looking for Christmas ideas for my classroom I search all my favourite teacher Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and Blogs . Here are a few awesome ones that I came across and just had to share. I’ve included a variety of grade levels too.
FREE STEM ACTIVITY
Grab this FREE Junior Christmas STEM activity here.