10 fun Christmas activities for the classroom

It’s only a couple of weeks until the Christmas holidays, so it’s the perfect time to start introducing some festive activities into your lessons! We’re put together a list of our ten favourite activities for all ages and levels.

Young learners

• Teach them the words of the 12 Days of Christmas, and then make up an action for each of the 12 things. You can perform the whole thing at the end of class. If you’re not much of a choreographer get some ideas from this video! This one is tried and tested, and children really love it!
• It can be difficult to get young learners into writing, and yet they always seem very keen to work on their letters to Santa – how surprising! You can tailor this activity to all levels, and there are some nice templates online with options like fill-in-the-blanks or colouring to inspire your students’ imagination.
• Bring in some scissors (not too sharp) and make some paper snowflakes with the children – they’ll love unfolding the paper to see the different shapes and they’ll look lovely on your classroom walls.
• If you’re working with really young children, you can make festive potato prints with them. Just cut out some shapes yourself and then get them to make Christmas cards for their parents. They’ll have fun getting creative! Check out this blog for inspiration!

Teenagers

• Watch Mickey’s Christmas Carol in class. It tells the story of a Christmas Carol with well known Disney characters as the stars. Teenagers will enjoy seeing the familiar characters from their childhoods in new roles and you can prepare discussion questions for after the film, which is 20 minutes long.
• Play Christmas charades to practice the present continuous. Write down festive activities like ‘Christmas shopping’ and ‘decorating a Christmas tree’ and get students to mime the activities. The student who guesses correctly must also use the correct form of the present continuous to describe the activity or they won’t get the point.
• See how many words students can make out of long festive phrases such as ‘Father Christmas’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ – use a timer to make it more exciting.

Adults

• Check out this great lesson plan based around Fairytale in New York. It makes for a very interactive class with lots of discussion, and at the end you can put the song on and watch your students’ faces light up when they realise it’s a Christmas song!
• Play Articulate with Christmas vocabulary. Make up cards with Christmas vocabulary, then split the class into two teams. Get them to describe the item on the card without actually naming it – e.g. mistletoe could be described as “a green plant, hung over doorways, when people meet underneath they have to kiss.” Set a timer and get each team to guess as many words as they can in a minute.
• Do a Christmas web quest about traditions in different countries. Check out this blogpost for some countries which have unusual traditions.

What do you have planned for your Christmas lessons? Let us know in the comments!