I love the month of December! There are so many great children's books about the holiday season. I don't have time to read them all so I try to pick the ones that are the favorites. One of my favorite holiday books is, The Legend of the Poinsettia by Tomie dePaola. I love it when extension activities can be used after reading a good book. It is one of the reasons I created an activity packet that could be used after a reading this story. My freebie packet was long overdue for an update! Fortunately, Edu-clips had some terrific graphics that worked well with the additions that I made. You can read the original blog post here. I wanted to include at least one activity for each grade level beginning with pre-kindergarten through third grade. The packet can be downloaded at my Teachers pay Teachers store. Here is a sneak peek that will show you both the old and new pages within the packet.
The children can draw pictures to show what took place before and after the miracle. The green weeds transform into beautiful Poinsettia plants. This will be an obvious change for the children to understand. The changes in the emotions of the characters could also be reflected in the facial expressions in the drawings as shown in the drawing above. This requires a certain level of sophisticated thinking and young children may not be ready for that. Discussing the emotions of the characters, before and after the miracle, and connecting it with facial expressions might be helpful before the children begin to draw their "before" and "after" pictures.
Here is a "child-made" visual of the people and the only animal mentioned in the story.
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| Uppercase letter printing. |
I made a game for pre-kinders and kindergartners. (Shown above) The goal is to get to the hay. The children pretend to lead "Pepito" to the hay. They draw Poinsettia cards from a stack of cards or from inside a bag. The cards have one, two, or three flowers on them. They count the flowers and move their markers the same number of spaces. I used buttons for markers.
I made another game. This one can be used with first and second graders. The concept is the same as with the first game. That is, lead Pepito to the hay. In this version, the children solve math facts and move the same number of spaces as the sum. If they "land" on a Poinsettia, they slide forward one space.
The children can solve the facts mentally as they play the game or they can write in the answers and then cut out the game cards. 
There are a lot of words that can be made with the word "Poinsettia". In the picture above, the words are categorized according to the number of letters. I've included a list of possible words in the packet.
I made a "Fill in the bubble" comprehension quiz about the story.
Here are the goodies again! I tried to include something for grades pre-k through third. I hope there's something YOU can use with your class. There is also a pattern to make a Poinsettia. Children love making crafts at any age! My pattern is for making large, paper Poinsettias. They are nice for holiday programs and decorations. The original blog post (2012) about this freebie has a few images of the Poinsettia pattern.
The picture below is the updated product cover. You can click on it to go to my Teachers pay Teachers store and get the free packet.
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