Christmas Book Activities: Olivia Helps with Christmas Lesson Trio

Inside: Get into the holiday spirit with the hilariously popular picture book and Christmas book activities for Olivia Helps with Christmas by Ian Falconer.

In the book Olivia Helps with Christmas by Ian Falconer we follow popular book character, Olivia the pig, as she hustles and bustles around the house to prepare for the arrival of Santa! As usual, Olivia gets into all sorts of mischief and makes the reader laugh with her silly antics.

Following your read aloud time, why not give one of the book based activities below a try! They provide an engaging way to discuss the book further while being creative and having fun together. These activities can be adapted for preschool through to third grade students, with varying degrees of support and a printable lesson plan with printable activity pages related to these activities can be found at the bottom of the post.

Olivia Helps with Christmas book activities and lesson plans

Olivia Helps with Christmas Book Activities

Olivia Helps with Christmas Book Activity #1: No Sew Stocking Ornament

In the story, Olivia makes sure to hang the family’s red stockings. For this activity you will make your own miniature, red stocking decorations to hang on your tree.

Supplies needed:

  • Red and green crafting felt
  • Scissors
  • Glue gun and hot glue sticks

Directions:

1. Begin by cutting out two identical “sock” or “stocking” shapes from your red felt. You might like to use the stencil provided with our Felt Christmas Stocking Craft or just freehand it. Make sure the two pieces match.

Christmas book with activities

2. Run a thin line of hot glue around the perimeter of one of the stockings, taking care to avoid the top.

3. Press the second felt stocking piece over the piece you’ve applied the glue to. Hold in place until secure.

4. Use the green felt to create a decorative band along the top of the stocking. Cut, glue, and press into shape.

Olivia Helps with Christmas activities

5. Create a small strip from the felt and fold into a loop for hanging. Attach with hot glue.

Optional: Use glitter pens to decorate your stockings.

Christmas books with activities_Olivia Helps with Christmas

Your mini felt stocking is now ready to be displayed on your tree. You can even tuck mini treats inside if you wish!

Olivia Helps with Christmas Activity #2: Creating a Holiday Task List

Just like Olivia’s family in the book, families often have lots of tasks to complete in preparation for the holidays. Teaching children to create a list of tasks to do encourages organization and problem solving. In this activity, children will create their own holiday to-do list.

Directions:

1. Begin by brainstorming the tasks a family might do to prepare for the holidays. These may be household tasks, as well as preparations for festive family traditions.

2. Start making a list of the kid friendly tasks from your brainstorm. Examples might include: shopping for gifts, wrapping presents, decorating the tree, baking cookies, hanging stockings, etc. This list could be made on a whiteboard, posterboard or a piece of paper.

3. Talk about why some tasks should be completed before others. Number the tasks in order of importance.

4. Invite children to make their own list of holiday related tasks to complete using our Holiday Task List Printable.

Olivia Helps with Christmas book activities and lesson plans

Olivia Helps with Christmas Activity #3: Comparing and Contrasting Pigs

In the story, Olivia is a fictional pig who acts like humans, and enjoys many of the things we do. In real life, pigs are very different to humans. In this activity you will compare and contrast Olivia’s character with real pigs.

Directions:

1. Begin by brainstorming facts you know about real life pigs. You can write these facts down on a whiteboard, poster board or sheet of paper if you wish. Your facts might include that pigs are very smart, like to eat fruit as a treat, and roll in mud to stay cool.

2. Talk about what makes Olivia a fictional pig. For example: she wears clothing, walks upright, eats cookies, lives in a house.

3. Now you can compare and contrast real pigs with Olivia and her family members. How are they alike? How are they different? Introduce the idea of recording similarities and differences on a Venn diagram.

A Venn diagram is a method of recording logical relationships between two different sets, or groups of objects, that share some things in common.

Model recording the differences between Olivia and her family and real life pigs on each side of the Venn Diagram printable. Then record similarities between the two groups in the middle intersection of the two circles.

4. Invite children to record their own responses on their own copy of the printable Compare & Contrast Venn Diagram page.

Olivia Helps with Christmas book activities and lesson plans

Printing Your Lesson Plans & Activity Pages

Click here to download: Olivia Helps With Christmas Book Activities . Save the PDF to your computer. Open the PDF and print the pages you require. When printing, select “Fit to printable area” (or similar) to ensure the page fits with your printer type and local paper size.
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Please note: All Childhood 101 printables are for personal use only, you may not use any part of this content for commercial purposes-that includes selling the document, giving it away to promote your business or website, or printing the file to sell. You may not share, loan or redistribute these documents. Teachers may use multiple copies for students within their own classroom.