THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS - Counting Down With A Book

If you are reading this, then chances are you love books as much as we do AND love sharing them with children even more.  

At The Little Big Book Club we know that children learn best through play.

Play is critical to young children’s social, emotional and intellectual development. 

However, play is not only a means to an end; it is also the source of laughter, joy, wonder and delight.

Every time you share a book with a child you have the opportunity to extend that story into a play experience.

Below you will find a list of some of our favourite Christmas books, each with one or two simple play activities to encourage you to not only help develop your children’s skills but to also share in the enjoyment of childhood play.

We are going to choose from the list below to countdown the 12 Days of Christmas with a book and some play every day. We hope that by giving you these ideas now you will have time to find some of the books, either from your library or bookshop, and organise any materials you may need to countdown form December 13^th to December 24^th.

This is our display of Christmas books.  I have seen some delightful ideas of people unwrapping a book each day in the lead up to Christmas. I decided not to do this for two reasons:

• Firstly, one of our focuses of our family this year is to become more environmentally aware through consuming less and leaving a smaller footprint. I think we will be using enough wrapping paper come the 25th lol!

• The second reason is that my girls are such little bookworms and I don't think that they would like to be restricted to one book a day. We keep our Christmas books aside during the year and only bring them out in December so they are wanting to experience them more than wrapping them would allow.

Please keep in mind that this is what suits our family at this time. If you want to join in the Countdown to Christmas please choose to implement it in ways that suit YOUR family.

Maisy’s Christmas Eve by Lucy Cousins

• Print out the Activity Time and use the templates to make Christmas decorations.
• Colouring, cutting and pasting are great for developing fine motor skills and spatial awareness.
• Visit The Maisy Fun Club to read another Maisy story, colour in a picture or play an online game.

The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by Kevin Whitlark

• Write or draw a list of 12 great presents for a dog.

The Twelve Cats of Christmas by Kevin Whitlark

• After reading the story, write or draw a list of all the cats that were in the story. How many can you remember?

The Great Reindeer Rebellion by Lisa Trumbauer

• Create a cute reindeer with a plastic cup,  pipe cleaners antlers and a pom pom nose.
• (Watch this space for an image)

Happy Christmas Spot  by Eric Hill

• We are going to make our own lift the flap Christmas presents. Help your child to draw something they would like for Christmas, or cut out something from a catalogue. Cut out a larger piece of paper to act as a flap. This is where all those old Christmas cards, and left over bits of wrapping paper come in handy.
• (Watch this space for an image)
• Watch Spot’s Magical Christmas on Youtube 

Suzy Goose and the Christmas Star by Petr Horacek

• I have never met a child that doesn’t delight in the magic of painting a wash over a crayon picture. Start by drawing stars with yellow crayon and paint over with a black or dark blue paint wash. Let the children be creative and draw their own pictures to paint over.
• Stick pop sticks together to make a star. Decorate with glitter, attach some ribbon and hang on the Christmas tree.

Princess and Fairy – A Very Sparkly Christmas by Anna Pignataro

• Write a Christmas message or draw a Christmas picture and decorate with glitter to make your own Very Sparkly Christmas.

The Very Snowy Christmas by Diana Hendry

• Make play dough but instead of adding food colouring add silver or gold glitter to make it look like sparkly snow. Add plastic animals to the play dough to make animal tracks just like in the story.

The Snowman Sound Book by Raymond Briggs

• After reading the book, crush ice to make 'snow'. This is a great sensory experience. Talk about how our Christmas would be different if we lived in a 'snowy' country.

Grug's And His First Christmas by Ted Prior

• Make your own Grug with our free printable Activity Time. Create a Christmas background for Grug.

The Jolly Christmas Postman by Janet & Allan Ahlberg

• This game is a variation of one that you may be familiar with – the adult is the captain and the children are sailors on a ship. The captain gives commands to the children which have a corresponding action. We have adapted it to include characters and places from the book.

You need a clear space, with boundaries, outside is best. The space where you are standing is called home. When the children hear the    word home  they must get to you as quickly as possible.

Introduce one boundary as the post office and the opposite side as the Three Bears cottage. When you call out those words to the children they need to run to those areas.

Once they are familiar with these instructions you can begin to introduce some actions. For example, when the children hear The Jolly Postman they must stand on one spot and pretend to ride a bicycle, Giant  signals everyone to climb a beanstalk.

Make up your own actions for other characters in the story.

• For a quieter activity we will then play the board game that comes in the book.
• Lastly we are going to go back through the book and find all the nursery rhyme and fairy tale characters. We will make a list of them so over the holidays we have lots of rhymes and stories to share. It is just as important to share stories with children that you can tell from memory as it is reading them from a book.

  Just Right by Birdie Black & Rosalind Beardshaw

• We are going to snip and sew and snip and sew just like the characters in the book.

I am hoping to find some cloth that is so red and Christmassy  so we can make some simple clothes that are JUST RIGHT for our baby dolls and teddies, because our favourite toys need presents at Christmas too!

• I am also going to cut some Christmas shapes out of felt for the girls to do some simple sewing around the border which we will then hang from the Christmas tree.

I hope you are inspired to enjoy the Twelve Days of Christmas with the special little people in your life and have the chance to enjoy a book and some play every day. It will be the best gift you can give them xx