So you want to give the nod to the season, but you also want to make sure all your students feel included. Good for you!
I’ve been privileged to see the holidays I celebrate centered in The United States for much of my life, but I’ve also had a lot of opportunities to see what it’s like beyond this glow.
I’ve lived in four other countries where some of the holidays I am used to are not very important at all.
At one of my schools, I had the role of international-student coordinator. As part of that role I got a chance to work with kids from around the world to share their cultures through different types of holiday celebrations, like a Day of the Dead dinner and a Lunar New Year party, and also to see how it might feel when these important moments are NOT celebrated in any way.
I married into a family with a different religious background than mine, and I’ve seen how it can feel difficult when other traditions take the limelight at this time of year.
It means a lot to have your traditions acknowledged at any age. But I’ll be the first to say it’s not uncomplicated territory in the classroom. I know I’ve messed up, learned, and evolved. I keep trying.
I very much believe that when we can expand our cultural viewpoints, we all benefit.
Of course, perhaps your school or community won’t allow you to discuss or celebrate any type of holiday at school. I can understand the circumstances that might lead there. If that’s the case, you might want to choose one of the other hundreds of episodes to listen to today.
But if you’ve always loved – like me – to give a nod to big days on the calendar throughout the year, I’ve got ideas to share today – ways to enjoy fun wintery activities in the next few weeks that make space for kids to celebrate whatever special days they want to, whether it’s Kwanzaa, Hannukah, Christmas, Lunar New Year, Snow Days, or one of the many other holidays flowing out of the rich blend of cultures in our classrooms.
What Holidays ARE Students Celebrating?
Let’s start with a look at Liz Kleinrock’s lovely children’s book, Come and Join Us. This book is so helpful in quickly explaining (with lovely illustrations) many of the holidays students celebrate throughout the year. It can help you be more aware of important days that might be coming up for your kiddos.
Of course, you could also ask them! Inviting students to share a day that’s really important to their culture as part of a survey or as part of your class calendar can help you find out when a student would appreciate your well wishes or your support, depending on the type of special day. How cool would it be to put up a big calendar each month and let students fill it in with their birthdays and important holidays? Then every day it’s easy to see what’s what.
Try a Makerspace Holiday Story
Inspired by Angela Stockman’s work with the writing makerspace, I designed this holiday writing project to help students design holiday settings and then write stories into them. Students can create any type of setting to celebrate a holiday they love, using playdoh, paint, collage, digital tools, sewing materials, cardboard and markers, etc. Then they’ll begin to imagine who lives there and the thread of a story they can weave inside.
You can grab this project free right here.
Explore Digital Poetry
When I created my winter poetry digital tiles kit, I included words connected to Diwali, Hannukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa, as well as plenty of words focused on wintery experiences and family time. My goal was to create an inclusive poetry scaffold to help kids write about whatever was meaningful for them at this time of year. You can follow these steps to create a kit of your own you can use year after year, choosing backgrounds and words you think would help your students celebrate what’s important to them. Does it take a minute? Yes. But it’s the kind of thing you can use year after year for a fun activity that prints into a lovely gift or display.
Winter Spin: Attendance Questions
You know how much I love visual attendance questions as a quick opportunity to build connection. In December, you can create attendance questions (or make a copy of mine here) revolving around wintertime or even give a low key nod to different holidays without putting any one holiday at the center.
Celebrate all the New Years with a 6 Word Memoir Wall or One Word Project
A six word memoir project (and display wall) is a great way to celebrate the end of one year, and a one word project is a lovely matching project to celebrate the start of another. A quick twist in your language and timing can help make it more inclusive. Millions of people will celebrate the Lunar New Year a few weeks after the solar calendar shifts on January 1st. In 2025, January 29 will usher in The Year of the Snake.
Write Holiday Lipograms
The holiday lipogram project, which I adapted from my poetry collaboration with Melissa Alter Smith for The Lighthouse, is such a challenging (in a good way) activity to experiment with a unique poetry form in a wintery context. After several guided brainstorming activities, students will write a winter piece using JUST ONE TYPE OF VOWEL. It’s so much harder than it seems at first!
Host a Winter Break Book Tasting
Hosting a winter book tasting (grab the free curriculum here) is a great way to wrap up your work in December and send kids off to break with a good book in their hand. A wintery snowflake theme helps keep this activity feeling fun and seasonal without making it all about Christmas.
Winter Poetry One-Pagers
The Poetry Foundation’s collection of Winter Poems presents lots of possible options if you’d like to do some close reading of wintery poems in December, and the poetry one-pager template can help students translate their interpretations into visuals for your walls.
Considering Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
Last but not least, lets talk about the (Dickens-shaped) elephant in the room.
Maybe your curriculum mandates Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for this time of year, or maybe you’ve selected it because it’s such a wonderful (short, positive) example of Dickens’ work in the world. I just spent a month diving into this book and its background to create a curriculum around it, and I have thoughts!
First of all, it’s a wonderful way to explore Dickens (having read Oliver Twist in High School and dragged around Hard Times for six weeks in college, I prefer its length when you’re trying to do a lot of other things in the year).
It’s also a really great way to explore the power of writing in society. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to try to influence the people of England to take better care of those who were struggling, and I like giving room for students to consider how art can bring change. Dickens is an empowering model as students are learning to write better and express their own ideas for this world.
I’m going to do a full blog post with activity ideas next week, but here’s what I want to say on the matter of inclusivity and this particular text. I don’t think that reading a book that focuses on a certain holiday is necessarily a problem. But I do think it matters that it’s part of an overall inclusive approach to celebrating and lifting up diverse cultures throughout your classroom choices. This is a big picture thing, and I know you’re already working on it.
Honoring many perspectives through your nods to different holidays, choices of poetry, classroom library features and First Chapter Friday selections, guest speakers, creative writing prompts, research topics, and everything else can combine to create an inclusive classroom environment that helps all kids feel seen.
