Christmas Science Experiments for Toddlers & Preschoolers

Christmas is such a fun and magical time to begin with, but it’s also a fun time to explore learning concepts, especially STEM activities, relating to the holidays. There are five fun Christmas science experiments appropriate for toddlers and preschoolers that you can do to both celebrate the season and wrap up the holidays once they’re over. So if you’re tot-schooling, here’s a fun way to review some themes and concepts, but still take a holiday break.

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5 Christmas STEAM activities & holiday science experiments

Wind down the year by reviewing some tot school themes while incorporating a holiday twist on them! This is a fun way to reintroduce concepts learned over the course of the year while enjoying time as a family and celebrating the holiday season.

Measurement

We used spring scales  to review the concept of measurement. While my daughter has been a little young to fully grasp and understand grams, kilograms, and newtons, she understands that when something is heavier, the spring pulls down further and vice versa. We had fun finding different ornaments that we could attach to the hook to see which ones made the spring expand more.

Magnetism

There are so many ways to explore magnetism with the Christmas season. From pulling out special Christmas magnets for your fridge, to building and stacking Christmas Trees with triangle magformers.  I love this invitation to play with magnatiles and bells from “And Next Comes L” because it incorporates trees, gifts, and bells; such a fun way to explore the holidays!

Color

Explore different ways you can dissolve candy canes like at Lemon Lime Adventures, but put a new twist on it! We personally decided to use Apple Cider Vinegar (yellow) and both traditional candy canes (red) as well as Sweettarts candy canes (blue) to explore primary color mixing! This is also a great way to use up old candy canes if you have extra.

Shapes

You can easily review shapes during the holidays in so many ways. From discussing rectangular Christmas cards to talking about how the tree is a cone, there are endless ways to incorporate it. However, one of my favorite ways is from Left Brain Craft Brain where they tinkered with nuts, bolts, and washer to make little tinkering Christmas trees. This is a great way to reintroduce talking about cylinders, hexagons, and circles!

Buildings

Finally, buildings and cities is an easy one to discuss because you can build gingerbread houses and even explore the concepts of structures by building gumdrop bridges and towers. See how high you can make them and enjoy this tasty and fun Christmas science activity with your toddlers and even older kids.

For more toddler holiday posts, click the images below:

For even more ways to incorporate STEM and STEAM activities into your holiday fun, be sure to check out an eBook by some of my fellow bloggers all about STEM activities for Christmas!