The first couple of days back at school after the winter break/Christmas holidays are always a bit different. Children are often buzzy and excited after all the fun, and happy to see their friends again! We always suggest leaning into these fun things that are happening in your students’ lives by timetabling in a specific activity, so children have a place to share their excitement and channel that energy, so hopefully it doesn’t seep too much into all the other learning and activities you have planned. So we’ve put together a few classroom activity ideas for New Year activities to do with your students.
New Year Wishes
Get children excited for the fresh year ahead by thinking about some things they’d like to do. Using ‘wishes’ can be a nicer way to discuss this than ‘resolutions’ if you don’t want to focus on negative things or behaviours they want to stop. You could have a chat about things they want to learn, places they want to go, new things they want to try, and things they want more of in their lives. They can share ideas or keep them to themselves, you could turn their wishes into a display, or make a kind of time capsule for them to revisit at the end of the school year.
Christmas Postcards
This could be a nice activity for some wind-down time, or something for the start or end of the day. There are lots of postcard templates online – or you could just print some lines and chop the paper in half, so you have A5 sheets with lines on one side that are blank on the other. Ask the children to write a postcard about their Christmas or winter break – you can focus on the family they saw and the things they did so everyone can join in, including those that didn’t celebrate Christmas. Ask them to draw a picture of something they did on one side, and write a little postcard on the other about all the fun things they got up to while they weren’t in school. They could even read them out afterwards!
Fireworks art
Many children will have seen some fireworks on New Year’s Eve, or even before, and you could show a video of fireworks to the whole class in case any children missed out. Then you can create some of your own firework-inspired art! Use some black paper for the night sky, and use chalks or paints to add colourful fireworks. Have the children experiment with different ways of creating the fireworks, will they use brush strokes or dots, which colours will they use? Pause them halfway and ask them to share their techniques and ideas, and then they can get inspired and try each other’s ideas out.
Year in Review
Create a little ‘Year in Review’ activity! This could be a worksheet, or a game where children write their answers and hold up a mini whiteboard to show everyone. You could even make it a little class survey, and collect everyone’s answers to show the most popular ones. Ask children to think back over the last year and think about what their favourite things have been. This can be their favourite food, book, toy, movie, song, a thing they did or a place they went. Was it a new favourite for this year, or has it been their favourite for a long time? This would also make a nice starter activity before the New Year Wishes task.
Random Acts of Kindness
Encourage your students to approach the new year with positivity and kindness by thinking about different ways they can be kind in the new year. Discuss the idea of random acts of kindness – find some examples online and ask if the children can think of a time someone else was kind to them. Emphasise that small acts of kindness can have a big impact, like holding the door open for someone. Then think about different ways children can show small acts of kindness in their life. How many ideas can you think of as a class? How many of them do they think they’ll do this year?
