Here are some Christmas activities to help your students become familiar with the seasonal vocabulary. I often play Jeopardy with my students in their last class of the year so you might want to consider that too.
For online Christmas and New Year activities, see our sister site learnhip.com
- Christmas scatter sheet (pdf) and exercises (see how to use scatter sheets for more information)
- Xmas pics (zip) for photo taboo
- Christmas conversation questions (pdf) – from our bank of ESL conversation questions
- Christmas Collaborative Crossword – a fun Christmas-themed pairwork activity for lower-level students.
- Christmas Taboo – a seasonal version of this fun word-guessing game
- Have the students help each other with their gift buying. Students practise asking questions and using the language of suggestions to help each other with their Christmas shopping.
- This is a great time to practise and demonstrate future forms. Ask students which fixed plans (present continuous), floating plans (going to + verb) and possible plans (will/might) they have for the holiday season.
New Year activities
I like to get my students to make new year’s resolutions using going to + verb, you could always tie this in with the fortune-telling game.
I also like to look at predictions made by various pundits for the year ahead. It’s also fun to track down predictions from the previous year and debate how accurate they have been.
- End of year review questions (pdf) – mixed tense questions
- End of year review activity for teens (pdf)
Christmas activities from other sources
- Alex Case has a great list of Christmas related activities at Tefltastic including the Xmas Party Negotiation Game.
- Nice, short video on YouTube – The Man That Celebrates Christmas Every Day!
- Here is a useful article about Christmas traditions in different countries – Top 10 Things Everyone Else Does At Christmas. I like to blank out the country name and adjectives and have students guess which country’s traditions are being described.