With the holidays come a LOT of excitement. I have compiled a list of books you can use for a super simple Christmas math read aloud in your classroom with minimal to no prep ahead of time. Perfect for this busy holiday season in your classroom! It’s nice to be able to lean into this excitement to build engagement in an authentic way in your classroom.
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Christmas Math Read Aloud Books
for Pre K and Kindergarten
If the “Poke A Dot” books from Melissa and Doug aren’t already a part of your classroom library, run, don’t walk to go grab a few!
The story is simple and, despite the title, has nothing to do with the traditional Night Before Christmas story. On each page of the book kids are introduced to a Christmas-themed item like cookies, reindeer or carolers.
Students then “poke” the dots on the page as they count the items. The plastic bubbles “pop” when they are poked reinforcing 1:1 correspondence as your students count aloud.
Your students will love reading these stories over and over and it’s a fantastic sensory counting experience!
Christmas Math Read Aloud Books
for Kindergarten and 1st Grade
In this adorable story, the Little Blue Truck and his friend Toad deliver Christmas trees to their friends around town.
The Little Blue Truck’s Christmas story and illustrations are adorable, the rhyming scheme is so engaging (and a bonus, phonemic awareness boost!) but as Little Blue delivers the 5 trees to his friends there is an opportunity to reinforce kindergarten and first grade math concepts as well!
Before reading the story, cut 5 triangles from green construction paper and affix a piece of tape to the back of each. As you are reading the story you can manipulate the trees to show how many are still in the back of the truck.
As you read, practice concepts such as counting back from 5, writing subtraction equations to match the story.
You can even explore partners of 5 as you read (trees delivered + trees left to deliver). I would conduct that activity very much like the partners of 10 activity described here!
Christmas Math Read Aloud Books
for 1st & 2nd Grade
In this adorable story, your students will meet The Littlest Reindeer who desperately wants to join Santa’s crew despite his small stature!
One aspect of his “training” to become one of Santa’s reindeer involves jumping as far as he can which makes this book an excellent lead-in to a simple measurement activity!
Option #1: Allow your students to jump from a starting line and measure how far they can jump. Put this information into a data table.
Option #2: Create an anchor chart with a data table including the lengths of the reindeer’s jump attempts. Ask your students questions about the data including which jump was the longest, shortest or comparing the distance of various jumps. Any activity that lends excitement to those tricky comparison relationships is a winner!
Christmas Math Read Aloud for 3rd and 4th Grade
Did you know that Jimmy Fallon wrote a children’s Christmas book? 5 More Sleeps Til Christmas is about a little boy who is counting down to the big day. Such a cute and relatable story! Not to mention, the illustrations are beautiful!
On each page, the story mentions the number of “sleeps” until Christmas but the date is also included in the illustrations. This book would make an excellent lead-in to an activity where your students examine patterns in numbers.
What is the date when there are 5 days left until Christmas? What about 4? 3? 2? What would the date be when there are 10 sleeps left until Christmas? Would there be an easy way to find the number of sleeps until Christmas on any given date in December?
The task leads to multiple points of entry and lots of math talk and exploration!
Christmas Math Read Aloud for 5th Grade
The Gingerbread Man is a classic tale of a cookie, come to life, who evades being eaten by a number of characters only to be outsmarted by a cunning fox with a sweet tooth.
Early in the book, the gingerbread man is baked using a recipe found in the book. The recipe is listed both using fractions and grams.
Reinforce fractions or decimal and whole number operations by asking your students to adjust to either a half or double recipe.
There is almost no prep to this activity aside from obtaining the book as you can project the recipe using a document camera and ask students to work on a dry-erase board or a plain piece of computer paper!
Looking for a more in-depth cookie math activity to follow up? Try this one!
If you use any of these activities in your classroom I would love for you to tag me on Instagram @themathspot so I can see what is sure to be fantastic work and math thinking!
