Christmas Homeschooling Ideas: Party Planner

Welcome to our festive end-of-term series where we aim to provide home educators and learning lovers with ideas on how to use the holiday cheer to help shape your lessons the week before Christmas!

These activities are relevant for any of Santa’s students from key stage one to key stage two but can easily be adapted for key stage 3 as well. No matter what year you’re in, there’s something fun for everyone this Christmas.

Monday - Christmas Party Planner

It’s the most wonderful time of the year but someone needs to take charge!

English Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Make a beautiful invitation for your Christmas guests: Write a warm, welcoming message or poem for your guests so they won’t be able to resist coming over to share some seasonal joy. If you’re really persuasive, maybe they’ll bring some treats!
• Design menus for the table: Become your very own M&S advert and see how tasty you can make dinner sound using your most descriptive language, similes, metaphors, hyperbole and anything else that will get your guests desperate for that first brussel sprout! Why not use your artistic skills to add decoration as beautiful as your language?
• After dinner entertainment anyone? Everybody loves a seasonal joke after dinner. Why not come up with some Christmas jokes and games for after dinner? Here’s one to get you started: What do snowmen like to do on the weekend? Chill out! Or, if your joke telling skills are as bad as ours, you could write some ideas for charades on pieces of paper for people to pick out of Santa’s hat! What a great way to end the day.

Maths Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Budget Basher: Christmas is an expensive time of year so you need to count the pennies. Work out everything you need for your Christmas dinner and visit an online supermarket site to calculate the cost of everything you need. Does it come within your budget? Where could you save some money? What deals are there on offer? What percentage are you spending on sweet treats, drinks or vegetables for dinner?
• Cooking King: There can be no bigger disaster than burning the turkey or roast potatoes at Christmas. Well that’s not going to happen with you on the case! Create the timeline for the cooking: When do the potatoes need to go in? How long for? When does the turkey come out of the oven? How long does it need to rest for? What temperature is everything supposed to be at?

Science Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Marshmallow Master: Who doesn’t like a marshmallow at Christmas time? Well now you can make your own and learn all about how the different elements of the ingredients impact the structure of the marshmallow. One little drop this way or that and your marshmallow mixture will only be good for the bin. Check out this recipe here.

Tuesday - Christmas Market Mission

What better way to spend a day than visiting a market. Don’t forget there are some important jobs to be done too!

English Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Write about your trip to the market and all the amazing things you saw, goodies you wanted to eat, the wonderful smells, the sound of the hustle bustle and of course, whether you managed to get everything you needed. 

• We always love the songs and carols at a market so why not write your own? Adapt just a few words to an existing song. E.g. 12 days of Christmas could be: ‘On the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave to me, decorations for our tree.’ Or keep the melody and adapt the whole song with your own lyrics. It could be a hit! You could also choreograph a dance to perform to your new song. 

Maths Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Market survey: Before you head off, you need all the info so ask your friends and family various questions and create a tally / frequency chart so you know what to get:  

  • What vegetables would you like with your Christmas dinner?

  • What drinks would you like?

  • What are your favourite treats?

  • What Christmas movies do you like?

  • What Christmas games do you like to play?

  • What are your favourite tunes?

• Market maths: Now you’re back, the fun really begins. 

  • How many g or kg of each vegetable do you have for each person?

  • Calculate what fraction or percentage of each vegetable every person would get. 

  • Calculate exactly how much each person in your house would get if you shared out a treat you bought using the weight e.g.100g of chocolate each. 

  • Find the mean average price of all the items you bought. 

  • What was the difference between the least and most expensive items? 

Science Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Markets are great photo opportunities with so many beautiful decorations, trees, singers and lights so let's immerse ourselves in the world of photography and light. 

• Use these simple techniques to take some great photos: 

  • Fill the frame: Get really close or zoom in so the whole frame is filled with an image. You get great detail or a thought provoking shot. Can you tell what it is? 

  • Shadow and light: Look for the shadows, reflections, light and snap away. 

  • Above or below: Take your photograph from an unusual angle to change the perspective. Make sure you’re careful though. 

• You could make them into Christmas cards or emails or even make a photo collage as a nice memory of the holiday. 

• Light and shadows are such an interesting science subject. Can you figure out how to make a shadow longer or shorter? How can you reflect light? How can you change the path of a beam of light? Have fun creating a maze with some books or Lego and use some mirrors to see if you can direct a beam of light from a torch from one end to the other. 

Wednesday - Cooking up a Christmas Miracle!

Christmas is the perfect time for making treats together to share with your friends and family. So let’s get cooking!

English Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Recipe Writer: Pick a treat to make and record every step of the process so you can not only share the tastiness but also the way it was made. Who knows, maybe your friends will make them for you one day! Make sure to organise the recipe well so it’s easy to follow and use strong instructional language. Don’t forget to include the equipment, timings and temperatures. You could even include some illustrations to support your writing and jazz it up a bit. 

• Is this the best Christmas cookie in town? Become the restaurant reviewer and write a persuasive blog post about your creation. Will you be positive and give it rave reviews or will the scathing feedback mean your days as a cookie cook are over? 

• Christmas Advert: We all love it when the Christmas adverts start to hit the TV. Now you’re the script writer, producer and filmmaker. Come up with your own advert for your Christmas treat and make it a hit. Write your script and storyboard to bring your vision to life and then get filming! 

Maths Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Accuracy is always the key: Make sure those treats don’t end up in the bin by getting every g, ml or second correctly calculated. 

• • Measure out the ingredients accurately by reading the scales on a measuring jug or set of scales.

  • Converting units for example Kilograms to grams, litres to millilitres, minutes to hours, hours to seconds. This could be helpful for your recipe too!

  • Calculating cooking time. Make sure you know exactly how many minutes and hours cooking time you need. You don’t want to mess things up at this crucial stage. 

Science Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Explore reversible and irreversible changes by looking at how ingredients change when they are cooked, mixed, heated, frozen etc. Can they be changed back to their original form and if so, by what process? 

• The wonderful world of food groups: What are the different types of food groups? How many of them are you covering in your dinner? Which are the most important?  Do you have the right balance? 

• Number 1 has to be food hygiene: How do you prepare food hygienically and safely? The last thing we want is anyone feeling unwell. 

Thursday - Christmas Stories

Why don’t you become the storyteller this Christmas?

English Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Read existing stories or watch Christmas films and use them as a good opportunity to explore some comprehension skills. Ask questions about what’s happened in the story so far. What do you predict is going to happen next? Why do you think that character did that? The questions are endless!

• Come up with your own Christmas story: The drama of the xmas tree! The Day the Cake Went Splat!

• Try rewriting your story as a comedy, horror, newspaper report. How do you change the language or the structure? 

• Test your memory and take turns telling the next part of the story or cut the story into pieces and order it correctly. 

• Get artistic and create a storyboard of the story by drawing or taking photographs.

Maths Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• If you can count how many words there are on a line, how many would there be in a paragraph? On a page? In a chapter? In the whole book? In the whole series of the book? If you can figure that out for the whole Harry Potter series, that's some serious maths skills. 

• Check out the TV guide to see what shows are on and create a data table breaking them down into things like comedy, drama, sport, film, news then convert the data into a bar chart or pie chart. Surely there are more films on at Christmas than anything else, right!?

Science Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• You can’t go through Christmas without seeing a film or reading a story about Santa flying by in his sleigh with Rudolf’s red nose leading the way. But how do they do it? Check out everything about forces and see how gravity, air resistance, friction etc all impact Santa’s ability to fly. Assuming it’s not just magic of course. 

• Why not make your own version of Santa’s sleigh and see how far you can get it to fly. How will you design it to stay in the sky? What materials will be best to use? How can you improve it after testing it to fly even further? Don’t forget the decoration. 

Friday - Christmas Films

It’s Friday so it must be time for a movie!

English Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Watch your favourite film together and stop it here and there to ask questions to each other or if it’s a new film, make some predictions about what you think is going to happen. Who is the movie master?

• Write a film quiz based on the films you’ve watched or are going to watch. You could include picture rounds or clips to really test people’s skills. 

• So you think you know the film really well? Rewrite the story in exactly 100 words, 50 words, 10 words, 5 words, 3 words, 1 word.

• Take a section of the film and write the scene. How can you create the same affects the film has on the viewer with your writing? 

• Write your own sequel or prequel to your favourite xmas film. 

Maths Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Watch the film and see how many different maths activities you could come up with linked to the concepts you know. E.g. You could count all the elves in the north pole. You could calculate the percentage of presents that are wrapped in red, green or blue paper. You could create a line graph showing the change in temperature over the month of December in the north pole. Can you name something for every maths concept you know? Challenge accepted. 

• Take your favourite scene from a movie and draw it out and colour it. Can you identify and label all the 2D and 3D shapes in the picture? Can you find any lines of symmetry? Can you identify any shapes that have been rotated, reflected or translated in the picture? Which shapes can you find that have right angles? Where can you see obtuse, acute or reflex angles? 

Science Christmas Homeschooling Ideas

• Sometimes what looks like magic in a movies is actually science! Check out this project that will take you through the magic and movie tricks to see the real science behind it all. Could some of the magic actually be possible in real life? Let’s find out. 

We hope you enjoy finding the learning in everything Christmassy and don’t forget to head over to EdPlace where you can find plenty of activities that link to these concepts and indulge in even more festive fun with our revision app or join our group tuition and share the learning joy with others!