What are your options?
1) Trawl the net. Its hard work and over and over you find things that you have done before or are unsuitable,
2) Ask colleagues. Decide to put some PPA time over to coming up with a few ideas between you.
3) Buy a book!
4) Ask the kids to come up with some ideas.
I want to deal with number (2) in the rest of this article – the art of generating ideas.
Most people seem to get the Christmas assembly freeze when they are faced with coming up with new ideas. It’s that blank sheet of paper problem. The best way of getting around it is to use some simple techniques to get the juices flowing.
1) Find an object in your house. In one minute, and it’s best if you actually act these out because of how it stimulates the brain, come up with as many ways of using that object as you can which is different from it’s intended use. For example a hat could be used as a bowl, hand warmer, Frisbee, fan. You get the idea. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t Christmas-y.
2) Quickly grab a sheet of paper and produce a mind-map of everything you can think of that relates to Christmas. Anything goes here. Trees, presents, short days, Christingles.
3) Just like you did in part 1, generate more ideas off the ideas you came up with in (2), be creative, be ingenious.
4) Now take a second sheet of paper and scribble down a list of ideas that you really want to say about Christmas and get creative again. Just a few ideas could be peace, hope, joy, love, new start, friends, family, value, Jesus life (and death?). Again create a second layer of ideas on your mind-map of everything that you can think of to do with these words.
5) Look at all the material you have come up with so far and start combining the ideas. Just put the words in the two different mind-maps together and consider how might you use those ideas in an assembly.
More than often you will come up with a few brand new ideas that will take you safely through the Christmas period and Christmas assemblies time of year.