The Wild Literacy Christmas Pack has 10 unique sessions aimed at children aged 7 - 14, adaptable for a range of abilities. Wild Literacy topic packs provide a variety of fun, creative sessions designed for teachers and parents to support children in literacy development.
Each Wild Literacy pack is a careful curation of sessions that build on and complement each other. Together, the pack covers multiple skills through a variety of activities and different approaches. This means they are not repetitive or boring and they work well for different learners. Topics are explored in lots of interesting ways and sessions provide a host of ideas and various ways to take the learning in any direction a child may be interested in exploring.
The Christmas Pack contains:
- Christmas Tree Biscuits
Hands-on fun that leads to different literacy skills such as descriptive writing, instructional writing, speaking about the experience, and writing in either a formal or informal tone. There is also scope for research, diary writing and gift making.
- Christmas Story Quiz
This activity uses a quiz to generate the basic ingredients for a festive story. The fun and familiar format of this sort of quiz helps engage children in the creative writing process. The session helps familiarise children with the main parts of a story to give them confidence in creating their own.
- Christmas Advert Project
Children write their own Christmas advert which tells a mini story. This session brings together many literacy skills in creative writing as well as persuasive language in one fun project. There is also the option to do a shorter, simpler version of this activity.
- Christmas Sequence: Naughty or Nice
A short session to introduce the Sequence activities (see 5 and 6). These develop skills in using different types of time connectives, great verbs and adverbs as well as description – which give children the ability to describe a series of events, write instructions, recount an event, and write diary entries. This set of activities uses chain reaction machines to help children increase their vocabulary in verbs and adjectives and give them the opportunity to practice using them in a fun and imaginative way.
- Prank Sequence
This session will use what children have watched and discussed in the Intro section (see session 4) to develop their own ideas and writing. The ‘naughty’ alternative to the ‘nice’ Santa’s Workshop Sequence activity.
- Santa’s Workshop Sequence
This session will use what children have watched and discussed in the Intro section (see session 4) to develop their own ideas and writing. The ‘nice’ alternative to the ‘naughty’ Prank Sequence activity.
- Symbolic Evergreen Decoration
Explores the traditions and meanings of various evergreens to help children understand how religious and cultural stories and beliefs can be represented and celebrated. They can then reflect on their own experiences and beliefs and how they could be represented. This is a great way to develop skills in analysing and using language to convey meaning. All this is tied up in the meaningful context of making a decoration they can have for the festive period which helps with engagement, enjoyment and confidence in the task.
- Introduction to Saturnalia
The final three sessions explore Saturnalia, an Ancient Roman midwinter festival held in honour of the god, Saturn.
- Saturnalia Poetry
Taking inspiration from the Saturnalia tradition of gifting short poems, this session helps gives children a meaningful context in which to create some poetry. These poems are a manageable length and there are lots of options making them more achievable for all.
- Lord of Misrule Game
A fun game, inspired by a key figure from Saturnalia, that develops literacy skills in writing instructions as well as the option for creating similes and further options for writing a diary entry, review, advert, or newsletter.
- Saturnalia Equality and Free Speech
Saturnalia offers a chance for critical thinking around who has power in society and whose voice gets heard. Literacy education is important part of children finding and using their voice to communicate the things that matter to them. This session helps children think about their own power and voice (the ability to speak out and be listened to) in society and how they might use it.
Click here to view a selection of sample pages from this pack
