Need some fun, engaging activities to keep your students learning as the end of the calendar year draws near? Tap into your students’ interest in presents, good meals, and family traditions with these engaging holiday activities on Formative!

• Winter holiday activities
• Christmas activities
• Hanukkah activities
• Kwanzaa activities
• New Year’s activities

[Winter holiday activities](id-all)

Give students a sampling of all the major December holidays with these interactive activities:

1. All about the December holidays

Want to do an overview lesson on the top three most celebrated religious and cultural winter holidays? This activity is for you! It’s perfect for ELA and social studies classes to help students build background knowledge on Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. Have students watch the embedded videos and answer questions about the hallmarks of each holiday.

[Christmas activities](id-christmas)

Bring some holly jolly happenings to your lessons with these interactive Christmas activities:

2. Celebrating Christmas challenge

How much do your students know about the history and customs of Christmas? Put their background knowledge to the test with our Christmas challenge! Test students’ knowledge about the origins of Christmas, popular customs, and other fun facts.

3. Feliz Navidad

Bring Christmas into your world language classes with this high school Spanish class listening activity. Students will watch a four-minute embedded video about how people celebrate Christmas in Hispanic countries. Then, they’ll answer questions based on the information from the video in sorting, true or false, and multiple choice formats.

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The embedded video includes English subtitles. Customize the activity for younger students by translating the questions into English to appear alongside the Spanish-language versions.

4. Chemistry and Christmas Songs

Think you can’t teach chemistry using Christmas songs? Guess again! In this activity, students will match chemistry clues to missing words or letters in popular Christmas songs. This activity is perfect for printing if you want your students to take a break from screen time.

5. Christmas Around the World

People around the world celebrate Christmas, and each country has its own special customs to mark the holiday. Have students explore Christmas around the world by choosing a country and researching their traditions, holiday meals, and how they say Merry Christmas. You can print this activity to make it available to your students offline.

6. Let’s save Christmas!

Even with the best plans, something can always go off track during the holiday season. Use this fun math activity to test students' addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills and help them solve five Christmas conundrums.

7. A Christmas Carol

Plan to teach Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” this holiday season? Use this collection of nine activities to assess students as they work through the novel. Each activity includes embedded text from Dickens’s classic story and questions that encourage an answer, cite evidence, and explain (ACE) response.

[Hanukkah activities](id-hanukkah)

Whether you spell it Hanukkah or Chanukah, this interactive activity can help bring the festival of lights to your classroom lessons:

8. Celebrating Hanukkah challenge

How much do your students know about the history and customs of Hanukkah? Put their background knowledge to the test with our Hanukkah challenge! Test students’ knowledge about the origins of Hanukkah, popular customs, and other fun facts. Customize the activity by randomizing the question order or providing partial credit.

[Kwanzaa activities](id-kwanzaa)

Help students understand the cultural significance of Kwanzaa with this engaging, interactive activity:

9. Celebrating Kwanzaa challenge

How much do your students know about the history and customs of Kwanzaa? Put their background knowledge to the test with our Kwanzaa challenge! Test students’ knowledge about the origins of Kwanzaa, popular customs, and other fun facts with a variety of question types, including hot spot, matching, and more.

[New Year’s activities](id-newyear)

Help students put on their thinking caps and assess how they can grow and learn with these interactive New Year’s activities:

10. Identifying strengths for the year ahead

The new year is a great time to reflect on your strengths and decide how you want to transform your life in the next 12 months. This activity will help students learn about goal setting and making resolutions. They’ll do a self-reflection, identify their strengths, and read an article—available with Newsela’s premium products at five reading levels—about how to keep their goals.

11. Setting goals for the year ahead

Once students have learned the importance of setting and keeping goals, they can set a resolution of their own with this planning activity. Students can read a how-to article about goal setting—available at five reading levels with Newsela’s premium products—and then create an action plan for setting and keeping a resolution in the new year.

The best present: Interactive activities from Formative

The Formative Library isn’t just for holiday content! It has a variety of pre-made activities developed by our curriculum experts and educators like you. You can use these templates as-is or customize them to fit your instructional needs. 

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Use the library’s sort filters to browse content by subject and grade level to find what you want. Create your own if you don’t see a template that matches your instructional needs!

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Log into your Formative account and choose how to customize your lessons or practice sets. You can create new slides with various multimedia, including audio and video. You can also import content from Google, enhance a PDF or existing document, or import any .CSV or .TSV file to create a practice set.

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Don’t have a Formative account yet? Sign up for Formative for free today and start creating activities for the winter holidays and beyond!

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