‘Tis the season for some of our favorite learning activities! The Christmas season provides so many opportunities for engaging young learners in fun winter themed activities – that can still be rigorous and enriching!
The wonderful thing about winter themed activities is that even if you don’t celebrate Christmas at your school, your students can still enjoy MANY amazing learning experiences! Come with us as we share our winter wonderland of winter and Christmas activities for kids.
Interactive Christmas Activities for Kids
Although we always found the holiday season to be one of the best times of the year, we also experienced several frustrating years. The frustrating years were always related to insufficient instructional time, distracted students, or more commonly – both!
It is just the reality of the season. With so many fun and exciting things to do and look forward to, learning can sometimes feel like it takes a back seat to the holidays. However, over many years of exploration, we found that interactive activities could help us keep kids engaged. Moreover, we figured out how to make many of these interactive activities fit into limited teaching time.
Winter Holidays Around the World
Let’s kick things off with an interactive learning experience that fits ALL classrooms! Our Winter Holidays Around the World resource is a bundle of interactive activities that take students on a journey through five different world holidays:
- Las Posadas
- Diwali
- Kwanzaa
- Hanukkah
- Christmas
Students explore each holiday beginning with a Hook Activity. This activity engages students’ background knowledge as they complete an I See, I Think, I Wonder graphic organizer while viewing an image.
After students are engaged in the topic, the learning continues with reading informational texts as a whole class. These texts are paired with more images to continue to engage the students while providing a scaffold for the reading.
Once students understand the holiday they are exploring, they take notes using a note catcher. This can also be completed as a whole class or individually. The notes students take will help them on the next activity – writing about what they have learned!
The final culminating activity is an art project. This provides students with a creative outlet to share what they have learned. Moreover, this visual representation of their learning can be used to decorate the classroom for the holiday season or taken home to share with their families.
How to Teach Kids About World Holidays
With 5 Holidays to cover, you may wonder about the best way to approach this. Our favorite way to use this winter holiday resource is to celebrate one holiday a week. This provides you with 5
weeks of lesson plans!
However, you can use this holiday resource in any way that suits your classroom! Here are a couple more ideas on how to use this holiday activity plan in your classroom:
Jigsaw: assign one holiday to different groups and then have each group share with the class or in small groups
Stations: set up five stations around the classroom and spend an entire day exploring these five holidays.
While we love providing opportunities for small group work and independent learning in the classroom, it may require more support for young children. Therefore, if you choose one of the group formats above you may need assistance from parent or teacher aides to help facilitate the learning at each station (or in each group).
If you’re not sure how this interactive resource will work in your classroom, test it out with our Diwali FREEBIE!
5 Days to Winter Break Activities
In addition to exploring winter holidays around the world, several other winter themes and events can be used for fun lesson plans. Here are five of our fave winter topics to explore with elementary students:
- Gingerbread Men
- Kindness
- Penguins
- Reindeer
- Snow
While kids are already excited to learn about these five topics we paid extra attention to making the assignments continuously interactive to keep engagement at this time of year. Moreover, what materials are provided for you to make implementation super easy!
Each Lesson Plan includes activities in the core subject areas. This starts with students reading about the winter topic of the day. The next core subject area is writing. Armed with the knowledge they learned from their reading, students write about what they learned.
In addition to reading and writing, students participate in a math activity with the same winter theme! Yes, that means exploring math through the lens of Gingerbread men, kindness, penguins, reindeer, and snow!
Beyond these three core subject areas, students can continue their exploration of each topic through additional activities. Each topic has an art activity as well as other additional educational activities.
How to Teach Kids About Winter Themes
Similar to the Winter Holidays Around the World activities, these winter activities can be implemented in a variety of ways. Our favorite way to use these activities is to assign one per day.
Each topic has enough resources to cover an entire day of learning. Therefore, providing you with a full week of holiday activities and lesson plans. With this in mind, we love to use it for the last 5 days of school leading up to the winter break. Since each day of lesson plans covers the core subject areas, students will continue to engage with important learning while being engaged with fun themes.
While we designed the 5 Days to Winter Break Countdown to support engagement and continued learning up until winter break, that is just one way to use these activities! Like the Winter Holidays Around the World, you could also create stations or use a jigsaw strategy. Choose what works best for your class and your students.
12 Days of Christmas Countdown to Winter Break
If you teach at a school celebrating Christmas, you can extend the 5 Day Countdown above to 12 days! That means 12 full days of lesson plans to keep your students engaged and learning for more than two weeks!
Just like the 5 Days to Winter Break Countdown, this project based learning resource engages students in learning about a winter or holiday-themed topic through hands on learning. Moreover, it uses the same format for exploring each topic through each core content area.
The only difference between the 5 Day Countdown to Winter Break and the 12 Days of Christmas Countdown is the topics students learn about. In addition to the general winter topics, this extended learning resource includes several Christmas topics. Here is a look at these 12 Christmas themed lessons.
12 Days of Christmas Countdown Topics of Learning
- Candy Cane Digital/Printable Activities
- Christmas Carol Digital/Printable Activities
- Christmas Tree Digital/Printable Activities
- Christmas Cookie Digital/Printable Activities
- Elf Digital/Printable Activities
- Gingerbread Digital/Printable Activities
- Kindness Digital/Printable Activities
- Polar Express Digital/Printable Activities
- Reindeer Digital/Printable Activities
- Santa Claus Digital/Printable Activities
- Snow Digital/Printable Activities
- Stocking Digital/Printable Activities
Printable Christmas Activities for Kids
As you were perusing the Christmas activity topics above you may have noticed that each themed lesson plan is noted as digital or printable. This means that you choose the format you use in your classroom!
While we find it easiest to implement the same format, either printable activities or digital, for all 12 days of learning – it doesn’t mean you have to! You could use both versions to provide variety, choice, or differentiation. You could even do some stations digitally and some with printable Christmas Activities.
It’s not only the 12 Days of Christmas that you can choose the format – it’s also the other two interactive resources. The best part is, whether you use a digital format or printable your students will LOVE learning about the various Christmas topics!
More Christmas Activities for Elementary School
In addition to the three Christmas and winter activities for kids shared above, we have several other holiday themed learning activities that can be used as printables. Here is a quick look at several engaging printable Christmas activities for kids available in The Core Coaches store.
How Santa Got His Job Read Aloud
Olive the Other Reindeer Read Aloud
Snowmen at Night Read Aloud Activities
Sneezy the Snowman Reading, Writing, and Craft Activity Kit
Snow Activities – Winter Themed Lesson Plans
This list includes an assortment of interactive activities like read alouds and mini research projects. The perfect assortment of winter and Christmas activities to keep kids engaged until after the New Year!
Oh! And did we mention that ALL of these activities are also digital?! Once again providing you with the flexibility to meet your classroom needs – without any extra stress or planning this holiday season.
Whether you go full digital to power up Rudolph’s nose or stick to paper, pencils, and glue, your students will have a magical holiday season of learning!
