Feed Santa Name Activity

Inside: This Christmas name activity helps preschoolers work on name recognition in a fun, hands-on way.

Free Santa Claus Name Game shown with nonsense name being fed to Santa.

There are so many fun ways for kids to learn in December! Last year I made free Christmas Name Puzzles to share here on the blog. And we have loads of other Christmas activity ideas here too. This year I decided to get Santa Claus involved…

Santa Name Activity

Santa Claus loves cookies, but he wouldn’t want to eat a treat that belongs to a boy or girl on his “nice” list! Your students can help the jolly old elf by selecting just the nonsense names and feeding them to him.

Skills Covered

Your students will work on the following skills:

  • Name recognition – and noticing nonwords starting with the same first letter.
  • Letter recognition – paying attention to all the letters in their name, not just the first letter.
  • Fine motor skills – see “How to Play” below for ways to add additional fine motor work to this activity.
Feed Santa name activity with paper cookies

What’s Included in the Free Printable

This freebie is 6 pages long:

  • Name entry page – open in Adobe Reader and type in student names
  • Feed Santa and instructions (1 page, color)
  • Generic cookies for all students (1 page color, 1 page black & white)
  • Personalized cookies (1 page color, 1 page black & white)

Preparation & Materials

All you need for this name activity is a small container, tape, and either scissors or a 2-inch circle punch.

This activity is easy to prepare:

  1. Open the file from Adobe Reader and type in student names. Look on the first cookie page at the bottom and fill in tricky nonsense names or even funny names – whatever your students need. Or, you can leave those blank.

Here’s what it looks like in Adobe Reader:

GIF showing how to enter names in the pdf file
  1. Once you’ve entered names, print the Santa and cookie pages. You can type new names over the old ones and print again, or save the file with a different filename each time.
  2. Cut out Santa’s mouth. I used an Exacto knife and then trimmed a little more with my sharp small scissors.
cutting out paper Santa's mouth
  1. Next, attach the Santa frame to a small container. I just taped one side so that it’s easy to flap open and remove the cookies.
illustration showing upside down Santa paper with bowl taped to it on just one side (circled because it's hard to see)
I circled the tape in red on this photo because it’s hard to see!
  1. Cut out all the cookies. You can use scissors of course, but these are sized so that if you have a fancy 2-inch circle punch you can use that to get the job done quickly. I only have a 1-inch punch here, so I cut mine by hand. The lines are fairly thick, so it’s easy to do quickly.
scissors, colored pencils, crayons next to cut out and colored b&w paper cookies
  1. Finally, if you printed the black & white cookies, you may want to color them or have your kiddos color them.

How to Play

I’ll start with the basic way to play with this:

The child will mix all the “cookies” together, and then pick up one. Is their name on it? If so, set it aside. If not, feed it to Santa! Repeat until all the cookies have been used.

hand feeding Santa a nonsense name

To continue, or to give the next child a turn, flip the lid up, empty the cookies, and start again.

paper lid being lifted to show nonsense name cookies dropped in

Extension Ideas

Here are a few other ways to set up this name activity:

  • Put the cookies in a sensory bin and have the children pull them out with tongs. For bin filler, try shredded paper, Christmas cloud dough, or kinetic sand. If you use dough or sand you can also add cookie cutters and a mini rolling pin.
  • Turn this into a cookie sheet activity. Students can lay the “cookies” out on a cookie sheet, and then use a spatula to remove each one. You can even add thin magnets before laminating to make it super cool!
  • Make this activity a game for two students. Flip all the cookies upside down and have the children draw one cookie at a time. The first to find their own name twice is the winner.

Download the Santa Name Activity

Feed Santa name activity with paper cookies - square image

Ready for the free printable for this activity?

To get your very own copy, you can sign up right here:

I’ll add you to my weekly-ish newsletter too – it’s full of ideas and more free printables. Of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.

Feed Santa name activity with paper cookies - horizontal image

Happy teaching!

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