Celebrating the Holidays in Your Classroom

As December nears and most schools just have a few short weeks until winter break, it's a great time to plan how and if you celebrate the holidays in your classroom. I am always a big supporter of celebrating the holidays in a class or school. I think that celebrating the holidays in your class or school help students who can't or don't celebrate elsewhere during the season have something to look forward to. Celebrating the holidays is also something students look forward to and planning celebrations can help build community. Here are some suggestions on ways you can celebrate the holidays this season in your classroom or school.

1. Sing Carols

There are different ways you can encourage singing this holiday season. At my school, students have a karaoke style party and sing for each other. Students are very supportive of each other no matter the vocal tone! At another school I worked at, the staff sang carols to the students. Not the normal carols, however. We adapted the 12 Days of Christmas song to be the 12 Days of School and each day one of us would sing something that "a student said to me...." and then say one of the common phrases heard around the school. It was a huge hit with the students and they talked about that song for months afterwards.

2. Cook Together

This is something Etc. is passionate about in her classroom. She loves cooking and enjoys sharing that with her students. Check out this article she wrote about cooking with your students. Measuring and calculating recipes could be a fun way to incorporate math as well or learn about social studies and the food & culture from around the world. Cooking also enhances and is a great way to do team building in your classroom. There are plenty of no bake recipes you can use in your classroom as well to make it easy or make a cooking contest among a few classes and have a competition! Here are three free bakeless holiday cookie recipes from Etc.'s store to help get you started.

3. Learn About Other Cultures

Since there are different winter holidays celebrated around the world and most likely in your classroom, this is a great time to get your students to learn about other cultures. Incorporating some fun lessons about the way other cultures celebrate help open your students' minds to new ideas while having fun. Check out this free download with descriptions of various winter holidays to get you started!

4. Help Your Students Give

The holidays are a great time to help your students give more this season. Your students could organize a canned food drive, make holiday cards for a local nursing home, or read holiday stories to younger students at your school. I have found that even students who are themselves in need still enjoy giving to others.

5. Exchange Gifts

Instead of drawing names and exchanging gifts, an easier way to have a fun exchange is to trade a well read book. Most students have at least one book they would be able to trade during the holiday season and getting a new book that another student likes is an easy way to encourage reading.




How do you celebrate the holidays in your classroom? Share your ideas or posts in the comments below and I would love to feature some of the ideas in the weeks leading up to the winter holidays.

Save on Christmas/Winter Holiday Products!

Tomorrow--Monday, November 26--is our Cyber Monday sale.  Save 28% on all of our products.  Make sure to check out our holiday products in particular.  Brief descriptions and links are below.  You'll never save more than during this great sale!

1) Christmas Around the World Art Activities for Fast Finishers: 25 printable art pages to encourage creativity in your classroom while helping students learn about winter holidays celebrated around the world.

2) Christmas Around the World Math & Literacy Packet: this 38 page packet contains 20 printable activities to create literacy and math centers or stations in your classroom. Each center can also be used as a printable worksheet.

3) Gingerbread Christmas Math Game: Lesson Lady presents Gingerbread Christmas Math Game! You choose if students use multiplication, addition, or subtraction to play this fun game.

4) Christmas Around the World Memory Game: This game contains 48 cards to help your students learn about Christmas/winter traditions around the world

5) Word Problems for Christmas/Winter Holidays: a packet of winter holiday word problems practicing fractions, decimals and percentages.

6) December 1-a-day History Puzzles: thirty-one word searches, one for each day of the month of December. Each page starts out with a short summary of something significant that happened on that day in history. Underneath is a puzzle containing key words from the summary. 

7) Christmas, Hanukkah, Posadas & Kwanzaa Bingo: Here is a fun game to play with students of all ages. This download includes over thirty different bingo cards with vocabulary from four major winter holiday celebrations: Kwanzaa, Posadas, Hanukkah and Christmas. (Note: Bingo chips not included.)


Plus several freebies!

Up to 28% off at Teachers Pay Teachers! 11/26/12-11/27/12

Teachers Pay Teachers is having a Cyber Monday sale in 3 days.  Take a look now at the products that you'd like and plan to place your order on Monday.  The deals never get better.  You get 28% off of all of our merchandise.

Click on the links to our stores to check out literacy and numeracy centers, holiday activities, art lessons, Spanish lessons and so much more.  From there you can sift through the 1,000's of other products from sellers around the country.  Stock up on your favorites November 26th to save, save, save!

Happy Thanksgiving to our readers!

Etc and I at One Less Headache want to wish you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving! We will be taking a short break this week from blogging and joining up again on Friday for some wonderful after Thanksgiving deals!

Fabulous Friday Freebies! Compilation of More Than 100 Freebies!

For this week in honor of Thanksgiving we are thankful for teacher freebies & free teaching resources. To celebrate those freebies we have compiled a list of all of our Fabulous Friday Freebies! Please enjoy this huge freebie collection. Most links have lists of at least 3-4 freebies.

• My favorite freebie linky party with almost 130 free lessons! 
• Thanksgiving related freebies.
• Day of the Dead freebies.
• Freebies for teaching writing.
• Spanish Heritage Month freebies.
• Educational Halloween freebies part II.
• Educational Halloween freebies part I.
• Freebies for celebrating students' birthdays. 
• Free fall themed lessons.
• Freebies for teaching reading.
• Free educational games for your classroom.
• Classroom management freebies.
• Labor Day lesson freebies.
• Goal setting and communication freebies.
• Free kids' educational websites.
• Back to school lesson and activity freebies. Could also be used for a new semester.
• Free summer Olympic themed lessons & activities.
• Free website for teachers and students to interact online, post assignments, and more. 
• Free teaching strategies for across the curriculum.
• Free resource for writing and language arts teachers.
• Free team building and ice breaker activities.
• Free summer school & summer themed worksheets, bookmarks, and games.
• Places that you can get into for free with a teacher ID.
• Free summer learning printables and a travel game.
• Great free websites for teachers to bookmark part I.
• Great free websites for teachers to bookmark part II.
• End of the school year freebies.
• Memorial Day freebies.
• Mother's Day freebies.
• Free perspective drawing lesson.
• Free sub plans.
• Fun and free websites to use with students.
• Freebies for fast or early finishers.
• Free PowerPoint games, free art lesson, and free mandala PowerPoint.
• Free writing, arithmetic, and a Spanish lesson.
• Free zoo math game, graphic organizers, and comic pages.

Developing an Attitude of Gratitude

"It's the little things that count."

"Count your blessings."

"Your attitude determines your altitude."

"It is better to give than to receive."

All of these are saying that have become cliche, and perhaps, therefore, less meaningful.  Thanksgiving Day is supposed to be a day of thanks.  Instead, it too often becomes of day of over eating...at least in my household.  Why should there be a holiday, though, to remind us to be grateful?  Give thanks at all times.  Make it a habit.  Teach your students to focus on the positive.  More than once, I've sat down and listed all the little successes and blessing as a way to intentionally look at the glass as half full when it felt easier to see it as half empty.  So, here are my top ten suggestions for bringing attitude--an attitude of gratitude to the classroom.

1. Teach them to pay special attention to "the least of these." Principals receive recognition for how the school is doing.  Teachers receive recognition for how the students are doing.  These figures are noticed and thanked for what they do.  No, not all the time, but they aren't invisible.  Who in your building is?  The maintenance or cafeteria staff?  The aides?  Why not dedicate a day to appreciating the people whose work most often goes unnoticed?  Throw them a party of appreciation.  Write thank you notes.  Teach students that everyone is important.

2. Count your blessings.  Don't relegate it to the category of empty cliches; practice it.  Have students write down what they are thankful for and post them in the class.  Be intentional about choosing to give thanks.

3. Catch your students doing something good.  Find the positive in all your students.  Don't let the recognition be for a display, but for something they are caught doing when they don't think anyone is watching.

4. Students may dread having the teacher call home because they are afraid of what they'll say.  Try putting call slips in your classroom that students can fill out requesting a call home for the good things they are doing.

5. Give out class awards.  Have students vote to give each other positive awards and hand them out in a  mini awards ceremony.

6. Teach them to make lemons out of lemonade.  Some of my students have a hard time coming up with positive things to say about themselves, and/or are embarrassed about their past. Teach students to look at their strengths, weaknesses and how to see the silver lining in everything.  For example, students who are coming to school despite academic challenges are resilient, especially the older students who are still sticking it out day after day when other peers in the same boat have dropped out.

7. Have students give each other shout outs.  Have them draw each others' names out of a hat and write down something positive they see in that person.  Read them out at the end of the day.

8. Have them write a thank you note to someone in their life.  They can work on their letter writing skills and their attitude of gratitude at the same time.

9. Have them do something that they will receive no credit for.  When I was growing up we made May Day baskets, filled them with candy, put them on our neighbor's doorknob, rang the bell and ran away before they could see who had been there.  This concept can be applied here

10.  Have students track growth on a self monitoring chart.  Recognize progress instead of accomplishments of uniform goals.

Thanksgiving Math Packet for Sale

If you are looking for a fun Thanksgiving themed math center for your students, check out my Thanksgiving Math Worksheets! Included in this pack are 10 Thanksgiving themed math worksheets that focus on math skills such as multiplication, division, fractions, converting fractions to decimals, pie graphs, and bar graphs. I recommend this pack for grades 5-8.

Although this pack is colorful and has lots of fun images, it can easily be used in black and white or color. All answer keys are included. Here is a list of the ten fun worksheets included in this pack:

1. Recipe Math Worksheet
2. Nutrition Facts Questions
3. Turkey Facts Multiplication
4. Cornucopia Greater or Lesser Than Coloring Sheet
5. Create a Thankful Pie Chart
6. Draw a Cranberry Bar Graph
7. Turkey Feather Numerical Patterns
8. Dinner Plate Math Match-Up
9. Thanksgiving Word Multiplication
10. Thanksgiving Word Problems

All of these are included for only $2.49!

If you prefer Thanksgiving literacy worksheets, check out my related literacy pack for more Thanksgiving fun.