Time for the obligatory Christmas post! I have found plenty of new activities that you can consider adding to your lessons about traditions in Spanish speaking countries (and even a couple for Francophone countries, hey-o!)
- We'll start with the best and most important thing that any language teacher could do at this time of the year (okay, at any time!). Kristin Duncan explains her Little Acts of Kindness activity here.
- MovieTalk activities for the 2015 Spanish Christmas Lottery commercial. Before you do the MovieTalk for this year's commercial, teach your students about the lottery (what it is, how it works, etc.) and watch some commercials from previous years with this unit that pre-teaches vocabulary or this unit that starts off right away with the cultural content. Kara Jacobs and Elena Lopez created a slideshow reading to accompany the MovieTalk reading, and you can download that from Kara's blog here.
- Speaking of commercials...Kristy Placido put together a packet of TWELVE activities for Christmas commercials! Check out one of the commercials here and follow the links to get the full packet.
- Speaking of Kristy Placido...here are some songs and activities for teaching about Christmas and the surrounding holidays!
- Allison Wienhold just posted this activity for El Día de Los Reyes Magos. It features a reading from Veintemundos.es with comprehension questions!
- Learn about various holiday traditions in Costa Rica with this slideshow from Maris Hawkins!
- Get lyrics for my favorite Christmas songs in Spanish here and sing them every day from now until Christmas!
- FRENCH ALERT! Here is a song lyrics activity from Cecile Laine!
- Teach students about La Pastorela, El Día de los Inocentes, and el Día de los Reyes Magos with this bundle of readings and activities.
- Learn about New Year's traditions with readings and activities that center on Las doce uvas de la suerte. Make sure you have some grapes ready for your students!
- More MovieTalk fun from Dustin Williamson: Santa Claws!
- Follow my Navidad board on Pinterest for tons of ideas for teaching about the holidays that fall between Christmas and Three Kings' Day
- Get this Christmas Wordoku...and then translate it to another language if you can so that we can share the love with teachers of languages other than Spanish! Beth Lemoine translated it into FRENCH here!
- Learn about Christmas traditions in Mexico with this one-page reading with comprehension activities.
- FRENCH ALERT! This just in from Madame Shepard: a Noël unit for novices!
- GERMAN ALERT! St. Nicholas day idea (okay, this could be used for any language with Christmas instead of St. Nicholas day...but yay! German idea!)
- RUSSIAN ALERT! Song idea from the great Michele Whaley. She taught us this song a few years ago at a First Friday meeting; it's so sweet!
- GERMAN ALERT! Frau Davis shared this German Christmas Wordoku!
- Since you're probably not feeling overwhelmed just yet, why not check out this list of 20 activities for Christmas from Cynthia Hitz?
Well, that should give you enough reading to waste effectively use your planning period. Happy Holidays!
