It's not called the 'silly season' for no reason, and it can be easy for children to get carried away with their list of wants when writing to Santa. If this is happening with your little people you might like to use these activities to focus on the difference between needs and wants. 

In our class we introduced the concept of needs and wants with mystery bag pass the parcel. With all of the children sitting in a circle the mystery bag was passed around (while Christmas songs played), when the music stopped the lucky child selected an item from the bag and had to decide if it belonged in the needs tub or the wants tub. This continued until all of the items had been removed from the mystery bag. Some of the items created a lot of discussion and the students had to explain their reasoning to their classmates, this made them think very carefully before placing the item into a tub! Download the labels for the tubs here. 

Items we had in the mystery bag:

• Shoe
• Water bottle
• Apple
• T-shirt
• Toothbrush
• Lollipop
• Nintentdo DS
• Toy train
• Camera
• Necklace

Following this whole class activity the students then completed their own needs and wants present (download here). For this task the students selected from 4 different coloured presents. They then cut it out and decorated the bow with glitter. After this the students browsed through catalogues and found at least 3 images of things they need and 3 images of things they want, these were glued onto the present under the headings 'needs' and 'wants'.

If your children are working at a higher level you might like to check out this needs and wants activity (downloadable here). It requires the students to write a list of things they have, need and want.

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'Remeber keep calm and pretend it's on the lesson plan!'

Top Teacher xx