5 Sensory Activities to do on Christmas Eve
Listen and Sing Christmas Songs
A good idea for this holidays is to listen to your favorite Christmas songs and enjoy a wonderful time as a family.
Children usually like music a lot and dancing is an excellent tool to relieve tension, Stimulate motor skills and social interaction.
Depending on each child, you can increase and decrease the volume, as well as experiment with different types of music.
A fun game to do while dancing is the “Stopdance" that is, dance while the music is playing and stay still in the position it was when the sound was lowered.
You can also play to imitate the movements made by another person dancing.
Christmas Puppets
Another excellent idea to have fun and stimulate the child's development on this holidays is to make puppets and then play with them.
Socks can be used as puppets, you can add eyes and wool can be glued as hair.
You can also create finger puppets,
simulating the different Christmas characters: Santa Claus and Mrs Claus, Rudolph, elves.
With these puppets, you can create very simple little stories and the child can add details and choose the ending.
Read Christmas Tales
Christmas is the perfect time for union and reflection, in which the family meets and shares warm moments together.
Time to tell stories! Nothing can entertain your children more than sitting with them to read them or tell them amazing Christmas stories. You can have the child help you create the stories by proposing different paths and choosing how the story goes.
With this activity, we stimulate the creativity of the child as well as the development of language and communication skills.
Another excellent idea is to take time to remember shared moments as a family as well as the story of each child.
Family photo albums are an excellent option to have a good time remembering the events that you have shared together
Cook together
Cooking gives us many possibilities, such as kneading
cookies or muffins. It also becomes a great moment of interaction with
a great reward: eat later what you have cooked. For children, it can be a very fun moment and also an opportunity to stimulate their motor skills, social interaction and imitation. The child likes to imitate his reference figures and do the tasks that the adults of the house do daily. Playing to put on an apron as a dad or mom is an option that we should never leave behind!
Calm Moment
The moments before the holidays are moments of anxiety, where everyone is in a hurry, worried, stressed and there is not much time to be present.
Sometimes it does not matter so much to have a lot of time but the quality of that time to enable your children a moment of calm, to be present, to relax and relieve tensions.
It can be 15 minutes in which we lie in a room, with low light and set with music or relaxing sounds; While we are in that shared moment we can do some activity that stimulates bodily and mental relaxation. One of them can be to play with one of our Rudolph or North sensory bottles, look at objects that rise and fall slowly, identify them. All this helps to focus on the present moment and set aside for a few minutes about concerns of the past or demands of the future.
In our previous post blog “5 Relaxation Exercises for Kids” there are some more ideas on how to enable relaxation in our children.