5 Ideas For the Last Lesson Before The Holidays

It’s a great idea to make the last lesson before the Winter Holidays special to make it memorable for kids and have them go on vacation full of inspiration and wishing to come back. Below I’ll share some ideas about things you can do in the last lesson.

Holidays around the world

Organize a CLIL lesson and teach students how other kids celebrate the New Year and Christmas in other countries. For example, many children do not know that Christmas and the New Year aren’t celebrated the same way (e.g., it’s summer in Australia) or even on the same day (25th of December in Europe and 7th of January in Russia). In addition, tell them about the meaning behind the festivals. Furthermore, you can include some information about traditional food and regional treats.

Find some videos, a movie or create a presentation on the topic and give them fun activities to do. For example, show some pictures of celebrations and countries and students have to guess and match. Or have them guess what’s the pictures are about, what customs are behind them. Then, you can do a project, e.g. students are split into pairs and make a poster about the festival they like most and tell everyone more details about it and why they like it.

Another idea is that students can search for information about other countries at home and share it in class next time.

Craft

Usually, we try to make the last lesson easy and light. Craft lessons are a good option for that as they make a great last impression. You can make or decorate Christmas ornaments or postcards. You can find online lots of ready-made templates for these ornaments, for example, Santa, reindeer, bells, etc.) Check for more ideas in our article “Winter craft activities”.

Videos

Watch some winter cartoons, movies or videos about the New Year or winter (e.g., Home Alone. The Night Before Christmas, How the Grinch stole Christmas, Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year, Trolls Holiday, Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, the Frozen. etc.). Make activities based on it.

For example, firstly show some pictures and ask students to order the pictures and guess what the story is about. After that, watch the video and check comprehension. Then, discuss what students like in the story. If you watch a short episode, ask what they think what’s going to happen next. They can also draw their favourite character or scene. The same can be done with songs.

Books

There is a wide variety of books about winter and holidays. Pick one depending on your students’ age, level of English, interests. It can be a fairy tale, an adventure story or even just a short rhyme. Discuss the cover of the book, the pictures to predict what it’s about. Then, read aloud together or you can even make a puppet theatre. After that, students can role-play the story. You can do a craft project at the end too, for example, illustrate a story or make a new book cover. Or they even can try to make their own book altogether.

Quiz

To make the last lesson fun but full of the information you can make quizzes, crosswords, puzzles, games or even create a quest on the topic. You can split students into teams. They have certain tasks to do which they get points for. For example, a wordsearch puzzle for 1 minute or play a Bingo game, or throw snowballs made of paper in a bin and say a word.