Are you a teacher who enjoys the preparations for the winter holiday season almost as much as the festivities themselves? If you do like this sort of thing, it can be fun and relaxing to shop for those little classroom gifts, make plans for winter holiday craft projects, or bake classroom-sized batches of sweet treats. At any rate, it’s a nice change of pace from all of those standards, tests, and objectives!
For language arts teachers, of course, there can be even more to do, with holiday-themed reading and language lessons – selecting traditional stories from Christmas and other winter holidays, creating vocabulary lessons from holiday word lists (There are two big lists of holiday words that you can download any time in another post – Winter Holiday Word Lists), and preparing seasonal writing prompts.
It can be a lot – but it can be fun, too! Whether you enjoy this early part of the holiday season, or whether you prefer to just be efficient about it and get to the the actual festivities, I hope you have a great winter holiday season this year! My small contribution is this set of Christmas bookmarks. You can download the page at the end of this article.
And now, I would like to take a minute to show you these two holiday-themed activities designed for language arts or reading classes.
Winter Holiday Task Cards
These cards, for seasonal practice of reading comprehension skills, each have either a fictional or an informational passage with topics including Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, Chinese New Year, and winter. The questions focus on reading skills that middle-grade kids often need to review such as making inferences, identifying settings, identifying cause and effect, making predictions, using context clues, and characterization.
This set includes both the printable cards and a digital version.
Christmas Story Studies
These story studies for classic Christmas stories include story questions and two additional activity sheets for each of seven traditional stories for the winter holiday season.
The stories are readily available for free since they are all in the public domain. If you are looking for a new holiday story that your kids haven’t heard before, I think you will find one (or more than one) here!
The story questions are text-dependent and focus on Key Ideas and Details, Using Context Clues, and Making Inferences. The activities include work with story elements including characterization, plot, setting, and theme, as well as vocabulary and figurative language in the stories. The questions and activities were designed specifically for each story. You can check out the preview in my TPT store to see the activities for two of the stories.
You can download the new bookmarks here:
Happy Holidays!
