The words to six favourite carols, every one out of copyright, with its source and date printed underneath, so you can print, sing and perform them freely: Away in a Manger Good King Wenceslas Deck the Hall We Wish You a Merry Christmas Jingle Bells The Holly and the Ivy Also included: A carol word search. A missing-words sheet. A Twelve Days of Christmas maths challenge, from KS1 (“how many gifts on day 3?”) to upper KS2 (“how many altogether?”). A write-your-own-verse sheet and a carol singers’ lantern design box. Answers included.

Four original Christmas stories for ages 8–11, each about 7–9 minutes to read, with six reading questions labelled by skill (vocabulary, retrieval, inference, explanation, prediction, summary) and a short fact-checked teacher note. The First Christmas Card (London, 1843): an 11-year-old girl hand-colours Henry Cole’s very first Christmas cards and secretly sends one to her brother on the railways. History: the Victorians, the Penny Post. Two Kinds of Light: best friends swap a Hanukkah night and Christmas Day, and one of them learns to ask rather than assume. RE and PSHE. Hanukkah dates checked for 2026 and 2027. The Present That Wouldn’t Arrive: a handmade mug, a missed-delivery card and a Christmas Eve drive to Morecambe. PSHE: families and kindness. The Oldest Carol: a village discovers its mysterious carol lists the names of people who died in the Black Death of 1349. History: medieval England, using sources. The text is two-column and print-friendly, with no images to slow your printer.

Four short, original Christmas stories written to be read aloud in 3–5 minutes, each followed by simple comprehension questions and answer lines. Biscuit Joins the Carol Singers: a dog who can only howl wins over the lonely neighbour nobody visits. Whose Footprints?: Rosa and Grandad identify robin, cat, fox and roe deer tracks in the snow (great with a winter walk or a science lesson on animals). The Two Snowmen: two snowmen fall out over a carrot nose and learn how dull it is not to be speaking. The Secret Code on the Fridge: Kemi and Tom crack an A=1 number code to find a trail of clues. It comes with a code-breaking sheet and answers. The questions mix finding information, simple inference, vocabulary and the children’s own opinions, so they work for talk partners, guided reading or written answers. The stories are written in UK English and set in UK homes. They have no brand names, and none of them asks children whether Father Christmas is real.