It is the first Monday in December, and the classroom has already changed. The tree is up in the corner, the windows are papered with snowflakes, and the children arrive talking about presents before they have taken their coats off. Morning work is supposed to settle them. Instead, the first ten minutes of the day are the loudest ten minutes of the day, because the work on the desks is either too easy to hold anyone or too hard to do alone, and the children know it. This is the week a Christmas activity book earns its place. A child sits down, opens to a coloring page, and the room gets quieter. Another child starts a word search. A third is already drawing a scene and writing sentences under it. Nobody needed a direction. The book did the settling.
That is the whole trick of a good December activity book: it looks like fun and works like practice. Coloring is fine motor work and patience. A word search is spelling and scanning. A spot-the-difference puzzle is careful looking. A maze is planning ahead. A write-and-draw prompt is a writing lesson that does not announce itself. The teacher's job is not to sell any of that. The teacher's job is to set the book up right, put it in the right places at the right times, and let December do the rest.
What Is Inside the Book
The Christmas Activity Book & Coloring Pages has 42 pages, and it helps to know what they are before the first day. There are two teacher pages and four student pages up front, then the activities. Ten coloring pages give the youngest children a calm start. Two word searches come with an answer key. Four spot-the-difference puzzles, two word scrambles and two I Spy pages build careful looking and word work. Three mazes, two shadow-matching pages and two connect-the-dots pages round out the puzzle mix. Then the book turns toward writing: four write-and-draw prompts, a wish list and a letter to Santa.
The pages are black and white, which matters more than it sounds. A black-and-white page prints cleanly on any classroom printer, costs nothing extra in ink, and can be copied the morning it is needed without a trip to the color printer or a conversation about the copy budget. Children color the pages themselves, which is half the point. A coloring page that arrives already colored is a picture. A coloring page a child colors is a piece of work.
The spread of activities is what makes the book work across kindergarten through 4th grade. A kindergartner can do a coloring page, a maze and a connect-the-dots page without help. A 2nd grader can do the word searches and the I Spy pages. A 4th grader can do the word scrambles, the shadow matching and the writing prompts, and will not feel like the book is babyish, because the puzzles are puzzles and the writing is real writing. One book, four grades, and nobody gets the wrong page — as long as the teacher hands out the right page.
The Morning Work Routine
Morning work fails when it is a surprise. A child sits down, finds a page they do not understand, and spends ten minutes asking neighbors or waiting for the teacher. Morning work works when it is a routine the child can run alone. The activity book is built for that, but only if the teacher teaches the routine first.
Spend the first December morning showing the class how the book works. Hold up a coloring page and a word search and a maze, and say what each one is for. "This page is coloring. This page is a word search — you find the words in the box and circle them. This page is a maze — you find the way from the start to the finish." Then put one page on each desk, the same page for everyone, and let the class do it together for ten minutes while you walk the room. The next morning, put a different page on each desk. By the third morning, children will sit down and start without being told.
Keep the pages in a tray by the door, one kind at a time, and rotate them through the week. Monday can be coloring, Tuesday a word search, Wednesday a maze, Thursday spot-the-difference, Friday a write-and-draw prompt. A rotation means the class never does the same kind of page two days running, and it means the teacher never has to decide in the morning what to hand out. The decision was made on Sunday, and the tray does the rest.
Put a finished example on the board for the first week. A child who can see what a finished word search looks like — words circled, list checked off — will do the work right without being told twice. A child who cannot see the goal will circle one word and declare the page finished. The example is the instruction.
Centers That Run Themselves
A center works when a child can run it without the teacher. The pages in the Christmas Activity Book & Coloring Pages are good center material for exactly that reason: the page is the instruction, and the answer key is the checker for the pages that have one right answer. Set up a center with a small stack of one kind of page, the crayons or pencils it needs, and a finished example. Then leave it alone.
The word searches make a strong ELA center. Put out the two word searches, a pencil cup and the answer key in an envelope marked "check your work." Children who finish can open the envelope and check themselves, which is a habit worth teaching. The word scrambles work the same way: unscramble the words, check against the key, and the child knows whether they were right without waiting for the teacher.
The spot-the-difference and I Spy pages make a good quiet center for children who need calm work. They are the pages to put in the center closest to the reading corner, where noise is already low. The mazes and connect-the-dots pages fit a math center, because they are the pages that practice planning and counting without looking like math. A child who will not sit still for a math worksheet will sit still for a maze, and the maze is doing the same work: think ahead, check your path, fix your mistakes.
Rotate the center pages weekly and keep the finished pages in a basket at the center. Children like to see what the group has made, and a basket of finished work is a record of the month. When a parent asks what the class has been doing in December, the basket is the answer.
The Writing Pages Are the Point
The coloring and the puzzles get the book opened. The writing pages are where the learning shows. Four write-and-draw prompts, a wish list and a letter to Santa — six pages that ask a child to think and then to write — and they are the pages a teacher should watch most closely.
A write-and-draw prompt works like this: the child draws a scene and writes a few sentences about it. The drawing is the thinking and the writing is the telling, and the two together show more than either one alone. A child who draws a detailed Christmas morning and writes two flat sentences is telling you something about their writing. A child who draws a stick figure and writes five lively sentences is telling you something else. Read both. The prompt is a quick assessment disguised as a fun page, and a teacher who collects the prompts at the end of the week has a real picture of where the class writes.
The letter to Santa is the strongest writing page in the book, because it has a real audience. A child writing to Santa writes to someone, not to a worksheet, and that changes the writing. Children write about what they hope for and why, and the why is the interesting part. "I want a bike because my old one is too small and I ride it to my grandma's house" is a sentence with a reason in it, and a reason is an argument. Teach the letter as a piece of writing, not as a decoration: one sentence about what you want, one sentence about why, one sentence about what you will do with it. Three sentences, and the letter is a paragraph.
The wish list works the same way at a smaller scale. A list is not a paragraph, but a list with reasons is a start. Ask children to write one reason next to each item on the list. "A puzzle, because I like to do them with my dad." The reason turns a list into thinking, and thinking is the point.
Do not grade these pages. Read them, write one short comment on each — a question is better than a correction — and hand them back. "What happens next in your picture?" is a better comment than a red circle around a spelling error, and it will get a better second draft.
Early Finishers Without the Queue
Every classroom has a queue of early finishers, and December makes it worse, because the work is seasonal and the children are excited and half the class finishes the math page in ten minutes while the other half needs thirty. The activity book solves the queue if it lives in the right place.
Keep a tray of the current week's pages near the finish line — the place where children go when their work is done — and teach one rule: finished work goes in the basket, then take one page from the tray. No asking, no waiting, no wandering. The rule has to be taught once, out loud, with a demonstration. "When you finish, put your math in the basket, take one page from the tray, and sit down and work on it." Then practice it. The first week, children will forget and ask. By the second week, the tray will empty itself.
Choose the pages for the tray on purpose. Early-finisher pages should be completable in ten minutes and satisfying to finish. A word search is a good early-finisher page. A maze is a good early-finisher page. A write-and-draw prompt is not, because a child who starts a writing prompt with five minutes left will either rush it or leave it half done, and both are worse than not starting. Save the writing prompts for morning work and centers, where there is time to do them well.
Differentiation: Same Book, Different Pages
The book covers kindergarten through 4th grade, but a class is not four grades. A class is twenty-four children at twenty-four different places, and the book works for all of them only if the teacher hands out the right page to the right child.
For the youngest children, start with coloring, mazes and connect-the-dots. These pages need no reading and no spelling, and a kindergartner can do them well and feel successful. Success matters in December, when the room is loud and the days are short and a child who feels behind will decide the book is not for them.
For children in the middle, the word searches and I Spy pages are the right step. They need letter knowledge and careful scanning, and they reward a child who looks closely. If a child cannot find a word in the word search, do not hand them the answer key. Sit down and show them how to scan: look for the first letter, then check the letters after it. One minute of showing is worth ten minutes of guessing.
For the oldest children, the word scrambles, the shadow matching and the writing prompts are the challenge. A 4th grader who finishes a word scramble fast is a child who is ready for a harder question about the same page: "Can you use three of those words in a sentence?" The question is the stretch, not a harder page.
Keep the levels invisible. Put the pages in the same tray, in the same kind of stack, and hand them out by table or by name without announcing which is which. Children notice everything, and a child who knows they have the easy page will decide they are the easy child. The Christmas theme does the hiding: a coloring page and a word scramble both look like Christmas, and from across the room they are the same book.
Substitute Days and Quiet Afternoons
December has more substitute days than any other month, and a substitute needs work that runs itself. The activity book is one of the safest choices in the cupboard for a sub day, because the routine is simple and the pages need no explanation. Leave the book's pages in a folder with a note: "Give each child one page from the tray. The rule is: work quietly on your own page." Leave the answer key in the folder too, so the substitute can check the word searches without guessing.
The quiet afternoon is the other December problem. After lunch, after a party, after a rehearsal, the class comes back loud and tired, and the teacher needs twenty minutes of calm. A coloring page or a maze is the right page for that moment. It is not a waste of time. It is a reset, and a class that has had twenty quiet minutes will do better work in the next lesson than a class that was pushed straight into it.
For homeschool families, the book works the same way it works in a classroom: one page a day, in the morning, as a calm start. A homeschool parent does not need to teach the book. The book teaches itself, and the parent's job is to look at the finished page and ask one question about it. "Tell me about your picture" is enough.
What to Watch For
Three things go wrong with activity books, and all three are easy to prevent. The first is the coloring-only trap: a child colors every page and never does a puzzle or a piece of writing, because coloring is the easiest page and the child has learned to choose it. The fix is the rotation. If the tray has one kind of page at a time, the child does the page that is there, and the week covers coloring, puzzles and writing in turn.
The second is the answer key as a shortcut. A child who opens the answer key before doing the word search is not cheating in any way that matters, but they are not practicing either. Keep the answer key in an envelope, and make opening it part of the routine: do the page first, then check. A child who checks their own work after finishing is learning to check. A child who copies the key is learning to copy.
The third is the finished pile. A book of loose pages becomes a pile of loose pages, and a pile of loose pages becomes recycling. Keep a folder per child, or a class basket, and put finished pages in it. At the end of December, the folder is a record of the month, and the child can take it home and show it. A page that goes home is a page a parent sees, and a parent who sees the work is a parent who asks about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What grades is the Christmas activity book for?
It is written for kindergarten through 4th grade. Younger children start with the coloring pages, mazes and connect-the-dots, while older children take on the word searches, word scrambles and writing prompts. The pages are independent, so a teacher can hand out the right page to the right child without sorting the class into visible groups.
How many pages are included, and what is on them?
The book has 42 pages: 10 coloring pages, 2 word searches with an answer key, 4 spot-the-difference puzzles, 2 word scrambles, 2 I Spy pages, 3 mazes, 2 shadow-matching pages, 2 connect-the-dots pages, 4 write-and-draw prompts, a wish list and a letter to Santa, plus 2 teacher pages and 4 student pages.
Are the pages black and white, and is there an answer key?
Yes. The pages are black and white, so they print cleanly on any classroom printer, and an answer key is included for the word searches and the other pages that have one right answer.
Can I use the book for morning work?
Yes, and that is one of its best uses. Teach the routine once — one page on each desk, the same page for everyone, for the first two mornings — and by the third morning children will sit down and start without being told. Rotate the kind of page through the week so the class covers coloring, puzzles and writing in turn.
How do the writing pages work?
The four write-and-draw prompts ask a child to draw a scene and write a few sentences about it. The wish list asks children to list what they hope for, and the letter to Santa asks them to write about what they want and why. Teach the letter as a piece of writing: one sentence about what you want, one sentence about why, one sentence about what you will do with it.
Is the book useful on a day with a substitute?
Yes. The pages need no explanation, so a substitute can run them with one instruction: work quietly on your own page. Leave the pages in a folder with the answer key and a short note, and the sub day takes care of itself.
Can homeschool families use the book?
Yes. One page a day, in the morning, works as a calm start, and the parent's job is to look at the finished page and ask one question about it. The book is self-contained, so it needs no teaching beyond the first page.
