Can you believe it: Christmas is here again! Even if you’re more of a Grinch than a Christmas fan, the one great thing about holidays is that they offer up awesome Christmas classroom activities for your EFL classroom. Even if your students don’t celebrate Christmas, you can use this time to discuss other holidays and cultural equivalents. Here are some ideas to help you through this Christmas period:
Read more: How to Make the Most of Your Resources in the EFL Classroom
Christmas cards
If you teach Young Learners, you can dedicate a lesson to creating your own Christmas cards. Start by teaching vocabulary related to Christmas imagery, such as Christmas trees, Father Christmas, presents, stars, reindeer….whatever you can think of. Your students can then use these as ideas for their Christmas cards, which can be taken home and given to their families.
Read more: 5 Steps to Vocabulary Learning in the EFL Classroom
Secret Santa
This is a fun lesson even for those students who don’t celebrate Christmas. Elicit from your students that Christmas is a time when we give gifts to people we care about. Write down the names of your students on little pieces of paper. Hand out these pieces of paper to the students. Whoever’s name they are given, they must decide what gift they would buy this person for Christmas and why. Encourage them to be creative! They must write the present and their reason on the piece of paper with the student’s name. The teacher gives the papers back to their original owners so they can read what gifts they have been given. Finally, they must guess who gave them that gift.
Holidays around the world
Even though Christmas is a universally recognisable holiday, there are many other holidays which may be more important to your students. Find out what holidays your students celebrate and write them on the board. Get your students to come up with questions they want to ask about those holidays. Arrange your students into groups so that they can discuss the different holidays with each other.
Christmas songs
Christmas songs provide great listening activities for this time of year. You can use the traditional Christmas carols, like Jingle Bells or Silent Night or you can update your selection with contemporary songs like Do They Know It’s Christmas, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town or Last Christmas. Create activities like gap-fills or ordering the sentences for the students to do while they listen.
Christmas is a fun time of year for the classroom. It’s nice to take a break from the usual syllabus work and do something a bit different. Use these activity ideas to bring some festive cheer into your classroom.
Please note: This blog post was originally published 0n 7 December 2017 but it has since been updated.
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