Traditions Around the World: With so many holidays and traditions around the world, I have been thinking about how we communicate those celebrations with others. Moreover, I wanted to know how our students could learn to talk about other holidays and traditions in the target language. With those thoughts in my head, I came up with an activity to share these ideas with students. So do you want a fun activity that will get total student buy-in? Use holidays to entice and draw them in. Everyone loves holidays. When a topic is of interest to students, it will be difficult to get them to stop chatting!
I don’t know about you, but I know my students love learning holiday vocabulary. In the past, I have been guilty of giving them a word list and doing very little with it. Now that I am changing my philosophy of teaching to a more proficiency-based approach, I want them to actually use the terms in real-world situations.
So how do I do that you ask…
Use fabulous and fun holidays and have students compare and contrast that holiday and traditions with their own customs. You can start with the graphic organizer linked to this blog to get you started. Infographics are another great way to get students prepared to communicate about holidays and traditions.
Another idea to go along with this theme of holidays is to have students create a book of all the traditions they have learned and shared the information with each other. Here is a printable book you can purchase from Education to the Core or have students create their own.
There are a lot of ideas you can do with holidays and traditions, like share your own and have students talk about what their family does in a roundtable discussion. Use this lesson plan I created for my upper-level classes to talk about traditions. One more idea is to study a holiday that students celebrate here in America, but not in other countries. Have them find a holiday another country celebrates that Americans do not. Have students compare the two holidays. Here is a free sample of this type of lesson.
Plan now and prepare for the celebrations in all seasons. Give students the skills they need to talk about these real-life topics that aren’t found in their textbook but can be found in a created themed lesson.
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