If you want to add a little spark of curiosity to your classroom, then pick up a few Christmas boxes and you will have the simplest holiday invitation to play ever…
During the holidays, we try to continue with some of our routine activities as well as introduce holiday related activities. But to spruce up the routines, we filled our holiday boxes with the materials the children are used to using and set them out on the table. When the children walked into the classroom, the tables looked rather empty but the children were immediately curious. “What’s inside the box Mrs. Stewart?” “Oh, I don’t know but we will soon find out!”
We have been using our Christmas boxes to set up invitations to play all through the week. No matter what is inside, the children are suddenly very interested and ready to take the materials out and give them a go…
So I bet you are even a little curious about what is inside the boxes we had out today. At least I hope you are! At one table, the boxes were filled with red and green craft sticks. The children used the craft sticks for making patterns for our morning math…
After the children completed a few patterns, they would give Mr. Hayden or I a shout so we could see what they came up with and then when they were finished, they sorted the sticks back into the red or green boxes so that someone else could come along and open the box…
At the other table, the boxes were transformed into our temporary holiday salt boxes along with the color words “red” and “green” printed on sentence strips…
We also set out a few small Christmas cookie cutters for the children to explore different shapes in our holiday salt boxes too…
And during circletime, we put our book and a few book tokens (extenders) in a gift box to spark a little curiosity about what we might be reading that day…
Before opening the box, I asked the children to try and guess what they thought might be inside the box. One of my students immediately answered, “There is a book and some Christmas ornaments!” Yep, she peaked inside the box before circletime, after all, I did leave a shiny gold box sitting right out in the open and opening it up to see what is inside is simply irresistible…
We have plenty days ahead to fill up our gift boxes with fun things to do around the classroom so when you see a box sitting in the background of one of our photos, you can be pretty sure that it was intentionally placed there to invite our students to come and play, create, discover, and explore…
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