Meghan’s Christmas, Christmas, CHRISTMAS games!

Christmas Snowball Game

This is a fun game for a classroom of kids! You’ll need:

• Balls of white socks, one per pair of children
• Plastic milk jugs, one per child

1. Prior to playing, clean the milk jugs and cut off the bottoms. You can now hold the handle of the jug with the opening facing the ground. It will look like a scoop.
2. Give each pair of children a milk jug and one pair of socks.
3. Pretend the socks are snowballs. Using the milk jugs, toss the snowball back and forth. See if you can catch the “snowball” five times without dropping it. To make it more challenging, up the number of catches or move several steps apart from your partner! WOWIE, that's tricky!
4. Variation: Give each child their own “snowball” and let them toss and catch it. They can also try to catch it while on their knees or while laying down.
5. Here’s another fun thought—why not collect all the “snowballs” and have an indoor snowball fight?
6. This game also works if you use tin foil balls instead of socks.

The Christmas Tree Race

For this relay, you’ll need 15 Green cups per team and a timer.

The goal is for each team to build a pyramid Christmas tree before the stroke of midnight. “Midnight” is determined by the timer. Choose how long you will allow the relay to go—perhaps three minutes—and when the timer sounds, it’s “midnight”. This creates a more cheery situation since EVERY team can win if they finish before the timer goes off. This also keeps the excitement level high because once one team finishes they can root for the other teams to finish before midnight too. It’s much more fun to have a whole class celebration of a job well done than to have just one team win!
To make it more interesting, run the relay again, but shorten the time period by thirty seconds.
Here's how it works...

1. The finished pyramid tree will have five cups on the bottom row, four on the next, three on the next, two on the next, and one on top.
2. One by one, team members run to the end of a designated area, stack their cup in the appropriate place, and run back to tag the next player.
3. This continues until the whole tree is built.
4. Some members may have to go twice, so make sure players go to the end of the line and pay attention. You might want to put 3 or 5 players on a team so teammates go an equal number of times.