Christmas Countdown Day #5 – The Polar Express

I love variety when it comes to planning a programme for my girl. Hence, apart from the hands-on activity of decorating a Christmas tree we did on the first day of advent, crafts (we’ve made a Christmas stocking and paper angel chain so far), and our maiden attempt at baking gingerbread man cookies, I also planned some literature-based learning, and the book I chose for Day #5 for our Christmas countdown is The Polar Express. I am so glad that Living Life Intentionally has come up with a Polar Express Literature- based pack which we can download for FREE so that really saves me loads of time and effort! 🙂

There are activities suitable for children 2 – 7 years old in the pack, so just print what you want. Here’s what I prepared for my preschooler:

Posing with the materials –

Matching pictures to their shadows:

Happily matching the pictures to their shadows

Working on counting and 1-1 correspondence –

I wrote the number words on one side and numerals on the other side of the clothes pins so that she could focus both on numbers as well as word recognition.

All done!

It’s impossible to wear Santa’s hat without sweating buckets in Singapore – check out her sweaty hair! After working out those finger muscles, she started to spot the differences in the pictures. This was quite challenging as the details are quite small!

Then we did simple subtraction –

She loves clothes pins so this activity about beginning letter sounds also appealed to her –

We used our home-made large dice for this activity. After adding up the dots on the dice, she’d cover the number with a pom-pom. To make the activity more challenging, I asked her to use tongs to handle the pom-poms 🙂

This sequencing activity was simple for her, but we had fun anyway –

Look at that cheeky face!

Sorting presents by size was initially challenging as there were more items than the usual sorting activities she’s done so far.

But she managed to do so after awhile! –

Next we did a cut and paste activity –

cutting conscientiously, as always

Following instructions – not every item cut out needs to be pasted!

Completed!

This was her FAVOURITE activity from the pack! Marshmallow counting just gave her a legitimate reason to eat marshmallows! Knowing her, I bought the tiniest marshmallows I could find. 🙂

Even little boy got all excited!

I got her to arrange the numbers in sequence first before we started on the marshmallows –

We practised counting beyond 20 for this activity. We also did plenty of practice on questions like ‘how many more marshmallows do you need to add to the cup (with already 5 marshmallows) to make 7?’ She usually doesn’t like attempting such questions but with the marshmallows, she showed more patience than usual 🙂

We had so much fun and we’ve done this activities over and over again! Thanks Living Life Intentionally for the great pack!