Decorating Christmas stockings for Santa is not only fun, it allows your pre-kindergarten students to put on their artistic hats. For this arts and crafts activity, set out plain fabric stockings, glitter glue, markers, cotton balls, sequins and other art supplies that your students can use to decorate their stockings with their personalized depictions of Santa. Hang up the stockings in the classroom or let the kids take them home.
Children love story time and you can up the entertainment level by encouraging your pre-kindergartners to come up with a story of their own. Position all of your students in a circle on the floor and inform them that they're going to tell a story about Santa. Start off the story with a simple sentence, such as "Once upon a time, Santa lived in the North Pole." Direct the first student to your right to create the next sentence, with each child in succession adding one sentence to the story. Go around the circle as many times as necessary until the story comes to a sensible conclusion.
Set up a craft for each student to create his own Santa beard out of construction paper, glue and cotton balls. Cut out a construction paper beard shape for each student and give each a pile of cotton balls to glue onto the paper. When they're done, cut a slit on either side of each beard and tie a string through the holes so the kids can wear their Santa beards.
Send your students on a scavenger hunt to recover Santa's "lost" things. Before your students arrive in the classroom, hide items such as a cardboard cutout of a sled, a reindeer doll, wrapped presents, a brown sack and other Santa paraphernalia. Lead your students on a group hunt around the classroom to find all of the items. You can make the scavenger hunt even more exciting by preparing a map and decorating the room as the North Pole. When all of the items are recovered, give the students candy canes as their reward for helping Santa.
Supply your students with crayons and coloring pages featuring various representations of Santa, then hang their finished artwork around the classroom. If possible, include Santa images from different countries and eras, using the variations as a supplement to a lesson about Christmas traditions in other cultures and time periods.