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Need some fun, engaging activities to keep your students learning as the end of the calendar year draws near? Tap into your students’ interest in presents, good meals, and family traditions with these engaging holiday activities on Formative!
Give students a sampling of all the major December holidays and holiday shopping with these interactive activities:
Want to do an overview lesson on the top three most celebrated religious and cultural winter holidays? This activity is for you! It’s perfect for ELA and social studies classes to help students build background knowledge on Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.
Have students watch the embedded videos and answer questions about the hallmarks of each holiday.
Help students practice poetry and literacy skills with a winter-themed selection. Students can read the included full text of Leo J. Molner’s poem “Winter Storm” and answer questions about word choice, meaning, and figurative language.
Use the winter holidays to introduce students to the three tools of rhetoric: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Students will identify examples of each tool and build an argument about winter holidays using them to strengthen their point of view.
The winter holidays are often also considered the season of giving. Help students practice solving real-world math word problems focused on budgeting and percentages for “Giving Tuesday.” Each question includes a calculator to assist students in solving the problems.
Encourage students to practice their multiplication and division skills with real-world shopping word problems for Cyber Monday deals.
Help elementary students practice counting and simple math with the fun theme of holiday shopping. In each question, they’ll engage with different winter holiday celebrations and “buy” popular toys, gifts, and items.
Students can learn how to apply mathematical concepts of profit and loss using algebraic equations in this small business shopping activity. They’ll learn how to use spreadsheets and calculators to solve real-world problems.
Help students practice real-world concepts, such as calculating discounts, comparing deals, and budgeting. Use shopping scenarios for Black Friday and pre-algebra word problems to encourage practice in a fun way.
Bring some holly jolly happenings to your lessons with these interactive Christmas activities:
How much do your students know about the history and customs of Christmas? Put their background knowledge to the test with our Christmas challenge! Test students’ knowledge about the origins of Christmas, popular customs, and other fun facts.
Bring Christmas into your world language classes with this high school Spanish listening activity. Students will watch a four-minute embedded video about how people celebrate Christmas in Hispanic countries.
Then, they’ll answer questions based on the information from the video in sorting, true or false, and multiple-choice formats.
The embedded video includes English subtitles. Customize the activity for younger students by translating the questions into English to appear alongside the Spanish-language versions.
Students will match chemistry clues to missing words or letters in popular Christmas songs. This activity is perfect for printing if you want your students to take a break from screen time.
Have students explore Christmas traditions around the world by choosing a country and researching its customs, holiday meals, and how people there say 'Merry Christmas'.
Use this fun math activity to test students' addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills and help them solve five Christmas conundrums.
Plan to teach Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” this holiday season? Use this collection of nine activities to assess students as they work through the novel. Each activity includes embedded text from Dickens’s classic story and questions that encourage an answer, cite evidence, and explain (ACE) response.
Whether you spell it Hanukkah or Chanukah, these interactive activities can help bring the festival of lights to your classroom lessons:
Test students’ knowledge about the origins of Hanukkah, popular customs, and other fun facts. Customize the activity by randomizing the question order or providing partial credit.
Help upper elementary students review their multiplication skills with a Hanukkah-themed activity. Students will complete problems themed around the eight nights of Hanukkah
Students can explore the science behind how candles burn, focusing on chemical reactions, phase changes, and energy transfer. Pair this activity with Hanukkah lessons to explore how menorah candles work.
Help students understand the cultural significance of Kwanzaa with engaging, interactive activities:
Test students’ knowledge about the origins of Kwanzaa, popular customs, and other fun facts with a variety of question types, including hotspot, matching, and more.
Students can dig into the food traditions of Kwanzaa with this activity. Test their knowledge of traditional dishes and their ingredients, and the cultural significance of each meal.
Encourage writing practice with an essay activity about the historical significance of Kwanzaa. This activity includes a list of related topics for students to choose from, a space to collect their research ideas, and a place to write and submit their essays.
Help students put on their thinking caps and assess how they can grow and learn with these interactive New Year’s activities:
This activity will help students learn about goal setting and making resolutions. They’ll do a self-reflection, identify their strengths, and read an article—available with Newsela’s premium products at five reading levels—about how to keep their goals.
Once students have learned the importance of setting and keeping goals, they can set a personal resolution with this planning activity.
Students can read a how-to article about goal setting—available at five reading levels with Newsela’s premium products—and then create an action plan for setting and keeping a resolution in the new year.
Ease back into the classroom after winter break with a reflection on the first half of the school year and what students want to accomplish before summer. Perfect for elementary students, this activity includes drawing and fill-in-the-blank activities.
Help students track their daily reading habits this January with a reading log activity. Ask students to set a January reading goal and track the books they read in the new year!
The Formative Library isn’t just for holiday content! It has a variety of pre-made activities developed by our curriculum experts and educators like you. You can use these templates as-is or customize them to fit your instructional needs.
Use the library’s sort filters to browse content by subject and grade level to find what you want. Create your own if you don’t see a template that matches your instructional needs!
Log in to your Formative account and choose how to customize your lessons or practice sets. You can create new slides with various multimedia, including audio and video. You can also import content from Google, use Luna AI to enhance a PDF or existing document, or import any .CSV or .TSV file to create a practice set.
Don’t have a Formative account yet? Sign up for Formative for free today and start creating activities for the winter holidays and beyond!
