Just because Christmas is over, doesn’t mean the jingle bells have to be put away in the box for the rest of the year! Jingle bells are great instruments to use all year long to help practice rhythms and add some fun in primary.
Use this fun He Sent His Son Jingle Bells activity to review He Sent His Son this month!
** See 30 He Sent His Son Singing Time Ideas here! **
Affiliate links are used in this post.
He Sent His Son Jingle Bells
If you’ve never used jingle bells before in primary, they can be such a fun tool to use in your lessons! When using jingle bells with kids, I like to use jingle bell wrist bands because they are easy to hold and not quite as noisy as full jingle bells.
I recommend this set of 20 colorful wrist band jingle bells to add to your primary supply list! These bells are cheap and easy to store because of their smaller size.
To use these jingle bells, children can either grip the band with their fingers, or wear it like a bracelet! If they hold it in their hand, they can hold the bells closed when it is not their turn to shake their bells.
He Sent His Son Jingle Bells Pattern
The idea behind this activity is fairly simple. For this activity, I’ll be choosing keywords that occur in the song fairly often. For He Sent His Son (Lyrics Here), the two words that are used most often are “Father” and “Son.” Some other words you might choose to use are “world” and “live.”
Once you have your keywords chosen, simply explain to the children that they should listen for these “special words” and only shake their jingle bells on those words. This creates anticipation for the keywords and encourages the children to sing along so they don’t miss one!
How to Play:
- Choose 2-3 keywords from He Sent His Son (Flip Chart here!) that come up frequently.
- Sing the song once through completely
- Pass out a jingle bell wristband to each child and instruct them to set it in their lap until you begin singing
- Tell the children the special keywords for the song and have them practice shaking their bells while you say those words.
- Invite children to shake their jingle bells on the keywords ONLY
- After singing through the song twice, invite children to share ideas for other keywords to add to the mix.
Ideas for Focus Keywords:
- How
- Father
- Sent
- Son
- tell/show/ask
- we/us
Tips for Preventing Chaos
Whenever I give a child an instrument, the first thing they do is play it as loud as they can. This is okay! Children are natural explorers and want to discover when they are faced with something new. However, it can get very noisy if you don’t have a few rules set in place. I’ve included some tips below to help keep the spirit in this activity that can quickly become crazy!
- Before passing out the bells, instruct children to set the bells on their lap until everyone has a jingle bell.
- When all children have been given a jingle bell, provide an opportunity for everyone to play their bell. Let everyone shake their bells for a minute or two. This helps to get the wiggles out!
- Once everyone has been given an opportunity to play their bell, explain that they should now only shake their bells when they hear the keywords in the song.
Extension Ideas:
- Instead of shaking the jingle bells on the keywords, have the kids shake their bells EXCEPT when singing the keywords. This can get pretty loud, but can be fun.
- Use the jingle bells to keep the rhythm. Introduce a steady quarter-note beat with your jingle bells and invite the kids to follow along. Then, add in the music and sing along to your beat!
- Give each class a turn to shake their bells during different sections of the song.
- Have one half of the room shake the bells for the question, and the other half shake for the response (every other line).
There’s lots of ways to use Jingle Bells in singing time! To add additional ideas and extension activities to this activity, head over to see how we used Jingle Bells with An Angel Came to Joseph Smith.
He Sent His Son Jingle Bells
Exclusive Printable
I’ve created a cheat-sheet with 4 different fun and unique actions and their keywords you can use to reference and a printable overview of the lesson plan shared with members of INSTANT Primary Singing when He Sent His Son is the featured song of the month! Or, pick it up as part of my He Sent His Son Teaching Packet in my shop.
For another fun logical activity, check out this He Sent His Son Finish the Sentence review activity!
