It’s Mid-November and many students are already counting down the days until winter break. While it’s natural for students to get excited about the prospect of a few weeks away from school, it’s important to keep them engaged in learning throughout December. The ELA Matters team has come together to bring you some ideas to keep your students focused and engaged throughout the month of December!
Holiday Themed Short Stories
It’s almost December and the holidays are just around the corner! Carolyn from Middle School Cafe understands that it is important to keep the focus on academics but she also knows there are some ways to include some holiday fun and keep students focused on academics.
Carolyn loves using short stories this time of year. They are a great way to review parts of a story or dive into character development. She has found some great holiday stories that are perfect for the middle school ELA classroom, The Elves and the Shoemaker and A Kidnapped Santa Clause. These stories are not only fun, but they also keep students learning!
Holiday Mad Libs
What’s better than silly fun that will keep your students engaged while still reviewing important grammar concepts? Not much, that’s for sure! Samantha from Samantha in Secondary loves to use Mad Libs to keep her students laughing and learning up to the very last day.
Mad Libs is the perfect activity because it’s so fun that students don’t even realize they’re reviewing parts of speech. You can also turn it into a creative writing assignment by having students create and share their own Mad Libs as well.
Samantha has a print-and-go holiday Mad Libs resource you can view right here. Downloading the resource will ensure that you have an age-appropriate, engaging holiday activity right at your fingertips! Save your planning time because there are always plenty of things to do during the holiday season.
Review Skills with Poetry
The days leading up to break usually mean that many students are absent at Lesa from SmithTeaches9to12’s school. When this happens it’s time to pivot (shout out to those Friends fans yelling PIVOT!) and that can mean a variety of options depending on who is in the room. Number one is usually skills practice with inference and close reading and, for both of these, poetry works wonders!
For building inference skills, provide opening lines to poems to infer the subject of the poem. Students can write a response, discuss with a peer, or better yet get them moving with a gallery walk of chart paper around the room with the lines across the top.
From this, shift to a close reading with a low-pressure approach using the poems that you used the first few lines in the previous activity. Use these poetry coloring and open response pages – you can check out a free sample here. Students read the poem, work directly with the language of the poem and/or use a provided prompt to write a response, and then spend a bit of time coloring and de-stressing.
One-pager Activities
One of Jen’s favorite ways to keep students engaged before a long break is with 1-pager activities. If you’re not familiar with 1-pagers, they’re a fun, critical thinking activity that asks students to respond to several prompts, usually in a visual format and aways on 1 single page. Students get to be thoughtful about their responses, the layout they choose, and even the colors they use when creating their visuals.
We’re coming up to Thanksgiving in the U.S., which is all about gratitude, so a 1-pager activity about gratitude is a wonderful way to connect to what’s happening outside school while keeping students engaged AT school.
I’m all about focusing on people and experiences more than things, so I ask my students to reflect on people, memories, and even their own personality traits they’re grateful for. Students always surprise me with their thoughtful responses and I love seeing them get super creative with them!
These 1-pagers are fun on their own, but they also make a natural segue into writing letters of gratitude before the U.S. Thanksgiving break or getting into a rhythm of keeping gratitude journals upon returning!
Read Alouds
Marissa from Creative Classroom Core is always looking for ways to engage her learners during the holiday craziness. Over the years she has learned to never underestimate the power of a great read aloud!
There is significant research that supports the idea of reading aloud in your classroom. Not only do read alouds help to calm over stimulated students, they also:
- •Encourage classroom discussion.
- •Allow students to build off of each other’s ideas.
- •Help students grow background knowledge and understanding of universal concepts.
- •Expand vocabulary.
- •Provide practice with comprehension strategies.
- •Enhance curiosity, imagination, memory, and creativity.
- •Help students make connections to real life situations.
- •Fosters an enjoyment and love of reading, and increases student interest in independent reading.
- •Encourages focus and reflection.
- •Builds classroom community.
- •Increases student attention spans and listening skills.
- •And More…
With so many benefits, it is easy to see how these strategies can help the learners in our classrooms. They provide engaging opportunities for all students to experience language in ways that are powerful and thought provoking.
This free read aloud companion to go along with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is a great way to focus and hold your students accountable during read aloud time.
Make it Kinesthetic
The days before a long break are often abuzz with a palpable energy. Natayle over at Hey Natayle is a big fan of channeling that energy in a positive way through kinesthetic activities. Not only will hands-on activities keep your students engaged, but they will also give your kids a classroom-approved outlet for their wiggles.
Get students up and moving before break using any of the following structures:
- Station Rotations
- Scavenger Hunts
- Text-Based STEM Challenges (See this example used with Louis Sachar’s Holes)
- Gallery Walks
- Escape Rooms
Whether you are wrapping up a big unit, squeezing in a mini-study, or reviewing key information, try pairing one of these structures with your content. Then sit back and watch your engagement soar!
