During the winter holiday season, student energy is usually way up, and teachers are often looking for ways to harness and channel that energy in productive ways. At such times, you can explore forming seasonal connections with curricular materials and also coming up with enrichment or celebratory activities that channel student excitement in ways that foster transferable skills, like creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration.
Here are 12 options that you might consider:
- Countdown Calendars: Kids love counting down to a holiday break. You could use Google Slides, Wakelet, or Padlet to build a countdown calendar. To make it more engaging, each countdown day could include trivia, a review question, or a community building activity embedded into it.
- Digital Kindness Projects: There’s never a bad time to spread joy, thanks, and kindness amongst the students in your classroom. The holiday season is a great time to have students create eCards, digital storybooks, or messages using Canva templates, and they can then share these with classmates and family members. The messages can be used to build up a positive self-image and foster a healthy classroom community.
- Jigsaw Traditions: Since there are so many traditions to honor during this time of year, you could have each student select one to research and share back with the class. These could be national holidays or personal family traditions. Every student should get a voice in this activity, and multiple perspectives should be represented.
- Virtual Field Trips or Interactive Maps: Tools like Google Maps are instantly accessible and engaging, and they can be used as a fun way to learn about the world. Students can be assigned locations and then tasked with researching winter weather, traditions, or ways of life in those locations.
- Story Writing: Students can use word processing programs, like Google Docs, or multimedia tools, such as Book Creator, to write stories about their own experiences or those of others from around the world. Whenever feasible, pick a focus that relates to your curricular objectives.
- Classroom Mascot on a Shelf: This is a spin-off of the popular version where an elf is hidden. Instead of hiding an elf though, you can create your own classroom mascot and then hide that each day in your classroom. This mascot could appear both physically in your actual classroom or virtually in your learning management system (LMS). If you post it in your online classroom, it can become an opportunity to send students on a virtual scavenger hunt that gets them more familiar with your digital learning spaces.
- Digital Escape Rooms: Use Google Forms to create themed escape challenges tied to content reviews. Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook has a library of free online digital escape rooms that you can use if you’d rather not make you own. These can be really fun and engaging activities. You could even take it to the next level and have students create their own escape challenges.
- Hour of AI: Why not celebrate an Hour of AI with a December theme? You can look for a winter-related Hour of AI activity from Code.org and CSforALL. You can also have your students engage with Scratch or Microsoft’s MakeCode Arcade.
- Podcasts or Newscasts: This is a great way to get students creating while also recapping what you’ve done as a class so far this year. And it’s a nice way to celebrate your student successes. The finished versions can be shared with families or other classrooms at your school. Adobe Podcast or your favorite video production tools are great creation options here.
- “12 Tech Tools of December” Challenge: You can use December as a way to introduce new tech tools to your students and get them creating. Each day, introduce a quick new tool or extension to explore and encourage your students to think creatively before the winter break. Again, you can tie the activities to your curricular objectives.
- Digital Portfolio Showcase: December can be a great time to recap learning from the first half of the school year. Have your students look through their work and pick their best examples to include in an end-of-semester portfolio. These can be built using a website tool such as Google Sites, put into a digital book, or even compiled with a simple digital slideshow tool like Google Slides. These products give students an opportunity to display their growth, achievements, and goals.
- Holiday Song Vocabulary Challenge: Have students translate popular song titles that have been rewritten using big, complicated vocabulary words. For example, you’d give them something like “Witness the ebullient juvenile with a cranium of crystallized precipitation,” and they’d need to figure out that this was really “Frosty the Snowman.” Use AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot to generate the complicated titles for you. It’s a fun way to stretch student vocabulary skills.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Relational Capacity
- Student Agency
Extend Your Learning
- 14 Winter Holiday Activities for School (Jordan Friedman and Zoe Del Mar via HMH Education Company)
- 10 Magical Ways to Teach Holidays Around the World (Linda Kamp via Around the Kampfire Teaching)
- Classroom Activities Before Winter Break (TeacherLists)