Studying celebrations and different countries around the world is always fun with little learners in kindergarten and first grade. It is so neat to explore different cultures and beliefs in various countries. In fact, you can put together an entire holidays around the world unit to help your students learn more about holiday traditions in other countries.
Learning About World Holidays
Teaching students about holiday traditions around the world is beneficial for several reasons:
- New Vocabulary: First, young students are able to learn new vocabulary words in a unit about world holidays. This includes country names!
- Increase Representation: Many of our students come from different backgrounds and will likely see themselves represented in a unit of holidays from around the world. This representation means a lot to our young learners!
- Encourage Global Citizenship: As teachers of the future generation, it’s important to encourage our students to be global citizens who are mindful and respectful of other cultures.
- Seasonal Celebration: Finally, a unit like this allows you to celebrate the season with your students without focusing on one specific holiday (if that is something your district requires).
Planning a Holidays Around the World Unit
If you’d like to plan your own unit to explore holidays around the world, here are some tips for putting together your lesson plans:
Step One: Prep
This unit includes a lot of great writing and craft activities, so it’s helpful to prep some storage solutions ahead of time.
I love to create a book ahead of time for each student because it can keep their writing responses nice and neat throughout the unit. You can customize the book for your class by choosing which countries you plan on “visiting” during the unit. With an entire world to choose from, you’ll likely need to narrow it down to fit your schedule.
Another fun thing that you can prep ahead of time is a suitcase for each student to store the holidays around the world crafts they create throughout the unit. You can either prep these yourself or have each student create their own suitcase.
One last item that you can prepare in advance is a passport book for each student. As you “visit” each country throughout the unit, students can receive a stamp in their passport book. Students love to see their passport books fill up with stamps and this makes a special keepsake when the unit is over!
Step Two: Teach
The next part of planning this unit is deciding how you will teach about the country you’ll be focusing on each day.
I like to use a PowerPoint presentation with real images of the location and their local holiday celebrations. This makes the discussion much more engaging for students and it helps the discussion come alive for them!
Students are much more likely to remember the facts about these locations and celebrations when they’re engaged in the discussion.
Step Three: Respond
The next part of a holidays around the world unit is to give students a chance to respond to what they’re learning about each country.
These cloze sentence informational passages encourage students to remember what they learned about the country’s holiday. As they identify and fill in the missing information in the passage, they will also be practicing their reading and writing skills!
Additional writing response pages give students the chance to solidify their learning. They can practice their writing and fine motor skills as they write and illustrate sentences to summarize their favorite fact about the country’s celebration. This student shared about how they decorate with poinsettias in Mexico.
Step Four: Share
Some schools have a showcase at the end of their holidays around the world unit where they share what they’ve learned with parents. If you decided to create books with all of the writing response activities, these make a perfect display for the showcase! Parents can flip through their child’s book to see everything they learned throughout the unit. This is a fun culminating activity that is perfect for the last week before winter break!
You don’t have to host an entire event in order for students to share what they’re learning. For example, you could create anchor charts together as a class to document the location, flag, and holiday traditions in each country you’re studying. You can display these anchor charts in the hallway to share with the rest of the school everything your class has been learning about holiday traditions around the world.
Step Five: Create
The anchor charts pictured above include a fun holiday illustration which students can recreate with their own crafts!
For example, after discussing Germany traditions together as a class, students can create their own nutcracker craft to match the one on the anchor chart.
After studying holiday traditions in Mexico, students can create their own Las Posadas piñata tissue paper craft.
These crafts are always so fun for students to create! You can either put them on display in your classroom for a winter bulletin board or add them to your students’ craft suitcases that you prepped at the beginning of the unit.
Holidays Around the World Unit for Kindergarten
If you would like to plan a Holidays Around the World unit for your class, I can save you some time! I’ve put together a set of lesson plans and activities that will help your students learn more about holiday traditions around the world. This unit of study includes presentations, passport stamps, anchor charts, and printable activities for 15 countries and the continent of Africa for a total of 16 holiday studies.
You can find the Holidays Around the World unit in my shop if you’d like to take a closer look at all of the countries included in this resource.
Save These Holidays Around the World Activities
Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite holiday board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find these resources when you’re working on your lesson plans for December.
