Full of Holiday Cheer (and Grammar, too!)

Celebrate the diversity of December! Whether your students are all from a similar cultural background or not, the different December holidays can be a single topic for the ESL classroom. Articles, videos, and blog posts about different celebrations are shared widely over the Internet, so chances are students already have some familiarity with traditions from around the world. Certainly you’d have to take into account any school guidelines, but if presented in an appropriate way, multicultural celebrations are fun to discuss as a group.

I like studying grammar in interesting contexts, and I think it’s just the right time of year to bring a holiday theme into a lesson. In my YouTube series on prepositions I’ve spent a good amount of time looking at specific prepositions and common collocations. At this point, I plan to zoom out and help learners think about the bigger picture — using prepositions at the sentence level. I’d like to show how prepositional phrases basically function as adjectives or adverbs.

If you think your upper level students would benefit from a grammar review along with some prompting to reflect on traditions around the world, then please take a look at my Full of Holiday Cheer_handout. The treatment of different cultural traditions is done with care. It’s really the teacher’s choice whether to keep it light or go deeper into certain aspects of a holiday. Enjoy.

Useful links:

Winter Celebrations on National Geographic Kids

Teaching Tips on Education World

Article on omisoka on Kids Web Japan

Facts about Kwanzaa on PBS

Article about Boxing Day on About.com

Photo credit:

Christmas Tree 2010 by Rexness. (January 2011) Retrieved from the Creative Commons on Flickr.