Educational Resources to Teach Your Students about Christmas

The Christmas season is a wonderful time to expose your young students to traditions in other cultures. While it is a religious holiday, it also embodies many cultural customs. This is a wonderful opportunity to expose your students to how other people celebrate. And of course putting a picture Santa or presents on any worksheet or activity helps children get excited and engaged. That's where a handy list of printables and clip art can become extremely useful.

Our list of resources also includes songs, a variety of lesson plans, worksheets and a complete list of teacher resources. This year, help your children embrace the true meaning of Christmas. Teach them about tradition, expose them to a variety of cultures, and use the holiday to make all your lessons fun.

Christmas is a time for sharing, singing, decorating, and enjoying the season. Experience the joy with your students, using these Christmas lesson plans, activities, printables, and skill builders. There are free worksheets, bulletin board ideas, printable art activities, literature units, and more! They will also enjoy Christmas games that you will find educational as well. You can discuss the religious and cultural meaning behind Christmas in your social studies class, create holiday crafts and decorations for art class, incorporate the seasonal theme into your math class, and read Christmas books in reading class. There is so much for your students to enjoy!

Chrome Music Lab is a free website that makes learning music more accessible through fun, hands-on experiments.

"Music is for everyone. Play with these simple experiments to explore how music works. They’re all built with the Web Audio API, and many of them utilize open source libraries like Tone.JS. We’re also providing open-source code so others can build new experiments based on what we’ve started."

Copy and paste this web address into your browser to view a short informational video on Chrome Music Lab - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqncqSxIwgc

This site offers the opportunity for students to Code a Dance Party to share with their friends. Use coding and music to be creative. Included are dance party activities, teacher resources, and an unplugged dance party activity where no computers are needed and student can learn coding concepts to choreograph a dance party. together. Look for lots of videos and resources for inspiration.

Kids can use Codeable Crafts to create simple animated stories. Give kids a general theme (for example, what did you do over the summer break?) and let them use their imaginations to create stories on that theme. Talk about storytelling, such as following a story arc and introducing characters. Kids can work on their language and verbal skills as they narrate their story. Save the stories and show them to the class. For a tech or computer class, Codeable Crafts can be a starter app for introducing programming. Carefully explain and explore what each coding block does, and give kids lots of room to experiment on their own.

Download from the App Store or Google Play.

This site offer a comprehensive coding platform has impressive resources for teachers. This learn-to-code program has the breadth and depth required to meet the needs of almost any teacher. The aim is to help teachers and families inspire the next generation of computer scientists.

At this site coding is broken out into grade level activities. Lots of examples to explore.

Everything you need to participate in the Hour of Code in December can be found here!

Code to Learn offers free resources to Canadian students and teachers to help them learn coding, robotics, computational thinking, and 21st century skills.

Codingville offers an easy and engaging way for students to learn coding/digital skills in a self-directed online environment.

Students and teachers will develop their coding/digital skills through Blockly coding. Blockly coding is a visual coding language where the user builds code by stacking ‘blocks’ together. These ‘blocks’ are chunks of code that can be translated into professional textual code, which is JavaScript. Students will learn how to code by using Blockly in a series of ‘Journeys’. Each journey culminates with a capstone project, and a final project that focuses on developing a web app. A journey is approximately 21 hours of content and is differentiated into specific grade groupings and skill sets: Grades 1-3 students, Grades 4-6 students and Grades 7-12 (middle/high school).

Students develop a ceremony to honor a person or commemorate an event in history.

You can learn pretty much anything with these videos!

Science, History, Language Arts, & Study Skills, Games & More!

Click "Take the test" in the bottom left corner to get started.

A short and quirky personality style test created by Adobe to showcase varieties of creativity.

The quiz will outline your creative strengths, untapped potential and your ideal way of contributing. For example "The Artist" has the strength of being able to bring ideas and concepts to life; but untapped is fearlessness in expression and this person make a good producer.

Types are the artist, thinker, adventurer, maker, producer, dreamer, innovator, and visionary. Each type includes a goofy animated character that represents the type, there is a description of each type, and who they work best with.

This would be a great addition to a learner profile, or to explore when examining creativity. We can all be creative - just in different ways. This is a great way to illustrate that and spark some rich discussion in your classroom!

This site offers opportunities to watch interesting videos, design cool things, build neat stuff and play awesome games.

Doodles Academy is a powerful free art curriculum for grades 1-5 that is available virtually. It provides art projects that offer authentic art experiences for students -- every student makes their own artistic decisions and walks away from the project with an artwork unique to them. Each project includes video tutorials and thorough lesson plans so that anyone can feel comfortable teaching art, regardless of their background or experience level. More, the art projects are aligned to topics and themes found in literacy, math, social studies, and science, so while students work through an art project they are building knowledge and context around other subjects.

DrawTogether is a growing, evolving show/newsletter/community/space for kids and grown-ups who want to draw, get creative, curious and connect with the world around us.

Sign up to start receiving the free DrawTogether newsletter once a week, usually on Fridays: videos, podcasts, activities and other heart/art fun for kids.

Explore the site and find lots of fun ideas of how to create awesome things!

Learn any language for free! French included!

German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and more.