Christmas in the LA Classroom

Some of you may have found your way here from my other blog: Confessions of a Modern Day Mennonite where we are celebrating Blogmas (a countdown to Christmas on a blog… obviously). If you found your way here from there (is that confusing?) Welcome! If you found your way here because you come here looking for my lovely insight, activities, and classroom procedures on substitute and regular classroom teaching then I’m glad you’ve stuck around.

Remember a little over a month ago when it was Halloween and I gave you a looong list of free downloads for a Halloween activity book or games to play or crafts to do or art projects to accomplish? Well here I go again breaking it all down by grade level once again… but this time it is for Christmas and this time it is just a bunch of writing activities (okay, some include more than just writing). Everything is free (or it was free when I found it).

Enjoy!

Much like with the Halloween one the early years grades have a ton of things that you can print off! Here are a few thought I thought were particularly great for kindergarten through grade 3.

1) A list of Christmas writing prompts from Snippets by Sarah

2) You NEED to visit Hand Me Down Mom Genes – she has a bunch of Christmas themed books up and a bunch of links and activities to do with them (they include art, writing, word searches, and math activities)… she has it all. Do one book/week leading up to Christmas break (if you want… I know I would!)

3) Have your students apply to be an elf with this Elf Application by The First Grade Parade. When they have filled out the application they can do the art activity to build their own elf.

4) I found a couple of Christmas books your students can make!

First, a Book of Christmas words and this second one on Christmas vocabulary (both pretty similar) and both found on Teachers Pay Teachers

5) Here is a bunch of activities that involve reindeer (including parts of a reindeer for vocabulary)  found on Teachers Pay Teachers

6) Get your students to write a how to with this How to Writing Pack

7) I thought this Christmas Sentence Flip Book was a neat idea. Students that have trouble forming sentences could use this to help them come up with a couple

Next up we have the grades 4-6 range. This one was still pretty easy to find stuff for (maybe because I was teaching it last year)… you can probably use some stuff from above for these guys too… just use your judgement for how easy it might be.

1) Last year when I was teaching grade 5/6 I read them the book “Snowmen at Night” and we did an art project on it. This year I found this Snowmen at Night graphic organizer… maybe we could have written our own versions of the story to go along with our pictures. Ps.  Here is the link to the art project we did.

My Classroom Museum of Language Arts

2) Writing Letters for Santa may be a little too young for grade 6’s but one could stress that the point is for them to practice their letter writing. Last year when I was teaching grade 5/6 we picked names for Christmas and bought each other gifts… we could always use these letters to let the person who has our name know what we want for Christmas. Then, as we get them done we could post them on the wall and the person who has the name could sneak it off the wall (or just read it and take notes). I think I would have put them in our MOLA.

3)  These Christmas Analogies aren't too exciting (in my opinion) but if you had 15 minutes to kill you could ask students some of them.. laugh about the silly ones and go "hmm" about the serious ones.

4) Last year we made How to Videos (and did some writing beforehand of how to do different things). Here is a how to writing activity for How To Decorate A Christmas Tree… maybe after students do this we could decorate a classroom Christmas tree.


And... just like with the Halloween activities the upper grades were the hardest to find things for.  The list is short (my apologies)

1)  Worksheet Place has a list of 34 Christmas Writing Prompts

2)  If you teach drama or are looking for something different to do for your classroom Christmas party I found these Christmas Improv Cards on Teachers Pay Teachers

3) This is just a regular how to write a persuasive essay page BUT you could alter it to be Christmas themed based on the topic… one off the top of my head are

Is Santa Real? (get them to write a persuasive essay that he IS real… because by high school everyone will likely believe that he is not).

I'm sure there are tons of other great ideas out there (that are also free) for things that you do in your ELA class around Christmas time.  If you are willing to share I would love to hear about them!  Tell me in the comments below what you do for Christmas in your classroom!