WINTER HOLIDAY ACTIVITIES

Let’s be honest here…Could the last 1-2 weeks before winter break be ANY longer? You’re assessing like crazy, report cards are due, there are interruptions galore, & your kids are bouncing off the walls! I love Christmas and all the holiday excitement, but this is a tough time of year for teachers! It can also be a really fun and memorable time in the classroom for your students, so I thought I’d share some of my favorite holiday-themed activities for this time of year. They’ll keep the kids happy and help YOU survive.

HOLIDAYS AROUND THE WORLD

One topic that my team and I have always covered is holidays around the world. It’s important to make sure we talk about many holiday traditions that our students might celebrate. If you have a student that celebrates a holiday that you don’t know a lot about, invite the student to share or invite parents to come in and do a lesson for the class! I’ve had parents teach about Hanukkah, Diwali, and Chinese New Year. The students LOVE it!

Las Posadas

My team and I have always done Holidays Around the World “rotations.” This means we each teach one lesson to each class. We pass out passports and give the students stamps like they’ve visited another country! I usually taught Las Posadas, which is Christmas in Mexico. These are a few of my favorite books for teaching about this holiday tradition.

We always include a craft with our holiday lessons, and with Las Posadas we would create a poinsettia craft. Here are some ideas for poinsettia crafts:

Paper Poinsettias from Disney Family

Paper Plate Poinsettia from Deep Space Sparkle

Hanukkah

My friend, Freddy, shared the cutest Hanukkah craft with me many years ago, and it’s still my go-to. I always read an informational Hanukkah book to my students and then my favorite: Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. If you don’t own this book, it is a MUST HAVE! I always keep out a variety of winter holiday books during the month of December.

So on to that cute and simple craft I mentioned. After we’ve read some books and discussed the history of Hanukkah and the significance of the menorah, we create our own! I am sure to go through this STEP BY STEP and completely make my own before I let the students go for it. Here are the steps:

Supplies needed:

black construction paper & a color of you choice
glue stick
liquid glue
white crayon (or pencil will work as well!)
GLITTER (Don’t be scared.)

Again, I always MODEL the steps before the kids get started. Fold the blue paper in half and trace hand. Make sure your THUMB is on the FOLDED SIDE. When tracing, just trace a bit of the thumb as this will need to be the longest candle. The shamash candle is the middle candle and is typically longer than the rest. It is used to light the other candles. You will also stop at your wrist because you will need to add a stand to you candle. (See example.)

Once the hand is traced, add the shamash candle and make it longer than the rest. Then, add a little base. I usually have to walk around and help a few students with this part. Once this is done, cut out beginning with the folded side. Open the folded paper, and you have your menorah! Glue to the black paper.

As students are finishing, I have them bring me their paper, and I add the glue to light the candles and sprinkle with glitter. I’m a control freak when it comes to glitter, but you do you! Here’s the final product!

Holidays that we typically cover are Hanukkah, Ramadan, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Las Posadas, and Chinese New Year. I wanted to incorporate the holidays into math somehow, so I decided to create Holidays Around the World Math Puzzles (in addition to my December Math Puzzles.)These have 8 differentiation options per puzzles (from single digit addition and subtraction to 3 digit) and also include an editable option. You can find the puzzles in my TPT store!

THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

I really wanted to do a full post just on this 12 Days of Christmas activity, but I’ve had so much trouble getting pictures to load! So, I’ll attempt to explain it because it really is SUCH a fun and educational activity that makes your students think about grammar. This picture below is the final bulletin board. Please forgive the terrible photo quality as this is an OLD picture!

As you can see, students have rewritten the words to The 12 Days of Christmas. They were learning this song in music class, so that really helped! I found a version on youtube with the lyrics typed up. We went through it once, and then we went through it line by line. I created an anchor chart with the lyrics, and we identified the number of syllables in each line. We then went through and identified the nouns and the verbs. This is an embarrassingly messy anchor chart, but this was real life, fly by the seat of your pants teaching (which tends to be when the best ideas come together!)

After this, I assigned partners and the students drew a number to determine which line they would be rewriting and illustrating as a team. The challenge was that the song had to flow in the same way as the original, so they had to match the syllables AND the noun and verb order in each line. This was challenging for 1st and 2nd graders, but it was SUCH a great application of what they’d been learning!

Once I approved the new line and ensured that it matched the original grammatically, the partners sketched out their pictures. Once they were ready, they used large construction paper. They wrote their new line at the top and used a ruler to draw a line to divide the words from the picture. They then drew their pictures (pencil first, then outline with markers and color with crayons.) See the example below. (Again, please ignore the terrible photo quality!)

HOLIDAY MATH IDEAS

You will not be surprised to know that I love an educational craft, so of course I have math crafts for winter holidays! All of these math crafts include 16 differentiation options from addition and subtraction to multiplication and division, but they are also EDITABLE, making them perfect for any grade level. All kids love a fun, seasonal activity!