Wanna get some ideas for your Christmas lessons this year? I know I am gearing up for it already, as I love this time of year so much! It’s actually all the celebrations of the fall season that I love to use in my lessons. It’s really quite a busy time if you want to teach students all about Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, like me. But it’s so worth it, because celebrations are such a fun topic to use in your language lessons!
As I have my various grade levels to teach, I try to come up with something that suits all of them. That means I have to come up with easier, lighter stuff, but also some harder, more in-depth things that I want to do with my older students. I’m just going to lay out what I plan to do here, and then you can pick and choose what applies to you, how does that sound? So let’s go!
Fun stuff for your Christmas lesson plan
I think for all Christmas lessons plans should include the four language skills: reading, listening, writing, and speaking. For this purpose, I have put together a free choice board of Christmas activities that includes all of these skills. It contains options for videos to watch and answer questions on, articles to read, prompts to write pieces of text on, and a vocabulary activity. This choice board gets students to choose the options that they would like to do, which provides them with ownership of learning as well as choice. Such important things for students. Click here to grab this free choice board right away!
The only language skill this choice board does not have is speaking. Before we dive into the choice board, I get students to have a small group discussion about Christmas, so that their prior knowledge gets activated. I ask them questions like: “How do you celebrate Christmas?”, “Where does the Christmas celebration come from?”, “What foods do you associate with Christmas”, etcetera. I use a set of discussion cards for this, and students always love to talk about stuff like this in small settings, like a group of 4 students.
Christmas lessons and carols
One thing I love to do with my younger kids is to teach them the lyrics to 6 popular Christmas carols! I get them to read the lyrics and listen to them as well. I get them to notice rhyme and meter, and help them learn new vocabulary that they find in these songs. And of course, we talk about the meaning of the songs: what is the song you’re hearing actually about? It’s such a fun activity to do, because most kids will have heard these songs at one point in their lives, so they are already familiar.
An added fun thing we are doing at my school this year is that we are going to take the groups to perform some Christmas songs in nursery homes in town! We are working together with our Music department to put together lovely performances and set up dates with the homes that work for both of us. It’s going to be an amazing experience for the kids, and for the people in the homes as well. Hopefully, COVID will permit us to go ahead with it too..
If you’d like to try these worksheets on Christmas Carols, click here to grab them!
Christmas lessons for teens
Another fun thing to do in your Christmas lessons for teenagers is not actually all about Christmas! There’s two options: Christmas around the world, or Winter celebrations. Let me explain. This would be a research project in which you would have students find out how people around the world celebrate Christmas. This cute website or this one will help your students do that. Get them to pick a country, or tell them to pick a country that starts with the same letter as their first name. After they find out the information, you could have them present their findings to their classmates.
The second thing you can do, and the one I’m doing, is an ‘expert groups’ activity on winter celebrations. How it works:
- Create groups of 4, 5 or 6 students, depending on how many celebrations you want to cover.
- Tell each group to do research on one winter celebration and become total experts on that celebration. Celebrations I include are: Kwanzaa, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Santa Lucia, and sometimes Three Kings Day.
- Students do their research and make sure the whole group is prepared to present.
- Then I rearrange the groups so that there is at least one student from each celebration in the new group.
- The group members must then each share what they have learned about their celebration. This way, ideally, all the members of the new group will walk away with new knowledge on all these different celebrations.
It’s a really fun project to do for students, and super easy to set up for you!
Christmas lessons for ESL
Something else I do in Christmas lessons ESL student love is learning Christmas vocabulary! There are so many traditions attached to this holiday, and thus, there are lots of words that non-English speaking countries either don’t even use, or that it would be useful for students to learn these words in the target language. I like using a little reading comprehension for them to get a feel of the words in context. For this I use a worksheet. And then I use a memory game or a dominoes game to revise the words with pictures.
Click here to grab my Christmas reading worksheet PDF now!
Christmas writing
And then there is the last thing I think is a must for Christmas lessons: doing some writing. I can’t let a lesson go by without getting my students to show off how well they can write, and Christmas is no different! I either use my discussion cards, or I provide my students with lined writing prompts sheets that they can use to voice their opinion on the celebration that is Christmas. They can do this only after they have learned something about it, or when they have prior knowledge of it. I use these writing prompts to help them along!
So that’s what I do in my ESL and ELA Christmas lessons! I hope there is something fun for you in there that you can use. Or maybe I’ve given you other ideas, that would be even more awesome!
If you loved everything I mentioned, I made a bundle of most of these activities and it is for sale in my store! Click here to check it out, or the individual resources in it.
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How to successfully teach a Thanksgiving lesson ESL students will love
5 tips for a wonderfully fun and easy Halloween lesson
