English Resources for Teaching About U.S. Christmas Festivities
Looking for resources to teach primary school students about Christmas in English? Well, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, I’ve compiled the resources I found online or created myself to teach about Christmas in English at the Spanish elementary school where I work.
Serving as an assistant English teacher in Spain, I often use holidays as a way to get my students excited about learning and speaking English in class. I find that when I start the class by telling the students we’re going to be doing activities related to a holiday, their engagement and attention levels increase tremendously. Besides, my position (auxiliar de conversación) includes teaching Spanish students about culture and traditions in the United States.
Of course, there are a wide variety of holidays celebrated in the United States. I decided to teach my students about Christmas for one simple reason—it’s what I celebrated with my own family growing up. So, I could share with my students my personal experiences related to how Christmas is celebrated in the USA.
As teachers, I think it’s important that we share our resources with each other. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when someone else can share their lesson plan. So please use and/or modify whatever resources below you feel will work for you and your English language classroom.
Songs:
Christmas carols are great options for getting your students to use their English while learning about Christmas. My personal favorite is “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” because it’s repetitive and it includes the phrases “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year.” Even beyond Christmas carols, there’s a wide variety of English songs that you can use to teach Spanish students about USA Christmas celebrations, but below are some of my favorites.
Activities:
Christmas cards: Bring construction paper and stickers to class and let your students make their own Christmas cards. You can start the class by teaching your students some English phrases related to Christmas, like “Merry Christmas!” “Happy Holidays!” and “Happy New Year!” Then, they can write these phrases on their cards.
What acts of kindness can you do to spread Christmas cheer? Explain to your students that people in the USA do acts of kindness around the holiday season to spread cheer. Then ask your students what sorts of things they can do to make the people around them happy. Encourage them to do something nice for their families when they go home from school!
Coloring pages: Search the web for Christmas coloring pages, and print out some for your class. They can color Santa, Rudolph, Christmas trees, gingerbread houses, and anything else that’s Christmas-themed!
Complete English Lesson Plan:
The above lesson plan includes Christmas vocabulary, songs, and speaking activities. I think it could fill about thirty minutes to an hour, depending on how much conversation you can get out of your students. If you’re looking for more resources to fill the time with English Christmas activities, you could always add one of the activities listed above.
To download the complete English Christmas lesson plan above, click here.
Sincerely, I hope you find these resources helpful for teaching about Christmas in English. It takes a lot of work to put together lesson plans, especially engaging, interactive, and visually appealing lesson plans that encourage students to speak English. Knowing that I could help cut down on other teachers’ lesson planning work would definitely make time and energy I spent working on this Christmas English lesson plan well worth it.
Besides, I really enjoyed getting to use these resources to teach my Spanish elementary school students about how I celebrate Christmas in the USA. My first, second, and third graders loved the songs and activities, and I hope your students do too!
Happy holidays!
