Once December hits, you better have the sleigh bells ready because kids are INTO it. Whether you lean into the Christmas holiday or if you are simply looking for winter activities with bells, here are a few that you can do with your students.

Jingle-y Songs

Listen to the Jingles – Music K8 This one I used my first year teaching for a sing along. It was catchy, cute, and even my 5th graders seemed to enjoy it. You can get the song here without having to buy a whole magazine. Of course, you have to add lots of bells and beat keeping to this one.

Jingle Bell Bees – Hap Palmer This is a cute little song that my friend Jane from SillyOMusic has a good activity for. Check it out here. She also has a few more song ideas as well!

Shake Those Bells – Lynn Kleiner – Find it on YouTube here.

Or pick ANY song you are working on and use the jingles as the beat keeping activity.

Jingle Rhythm Train

This is a writing/reading practice activity. I got this cute Christmas Train clip art on TpT, put 4 on a page, printed, laminated, and cut. You could do 2 to a page if you wanted them to be a little bigger to read from further away. The plain cars are perfect for writing on with dry erase markers once they are laminated. The more elaborate ones are good spacers if you need to put in measure rests to let students reset.

This is a fun way to let students practice writing a pattern with the concepts you are working on right now, then have them line them ALL up and walk from the front of the train to the back while reading the patterns. You can do this as a center or as an all class activity. Of course, students can shake jingle bells to the rhythms as they read.

I personally like letting students read the train themselves in an activity like this and they each have to walk through the train. It’s good individual practice and while I can’t grade each student, I can stand in the middle and check in on how they are doing as they walk through. This is nice because it gives them a chance to do this individually and without outside help to follow.

Here’s some of the adults at the MIKE workshop walking down the Jingle Train.

This is the jingle bell set we were using. I got them for LESS than $20 on Amazon in 2019 and they are still the same price I paid then.

Sleigh Ride

This has always been one of my favorites. Here’s a few ways you can use it:

• Beat keeping practice for K/1.
• Older students make up a body percussion for the main theme.
• Introduce the vibraslap!
• Play Alongs – there are a few on YouTube including this one by Ready Go Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt9CMuJcvPc

Composing

This fun set is a perfect way to let your students get creative and play it out with some jingle bells!

Jingle Bells

Let’s talk about Jingle Bells. It’s got some roots in minstrel shows. I’m not going to teach it again in my classroom, besides that since all the kids know it, why teach it? I want to introduce new music to my students. And it’s not something that I am going to rid the world of. It is fully entrenched in our society and is 100% a song that I’d say falls into the folk song category because everyone knows it. Dozens of recording artists have their own version. Even Sesame Street uses the tune as a song Elmo makes up words to for whatever he’s talking about that day. I’ve heard the argument that a song that had minstrel roots had a life outside of that so it’s acceptable to use (I disagree with this statement). This is the ONLY song I think could fit in that category, but I still don’t want to use it in my classroom because I don’t want one child to look back and say I remember that with Mrs. Stouffer, and she probably knew and taught it anyway even though it used to be made to make fun of people like me. Just my two cents on that.

I hope this has given you some jingle-y fun ideas!