Holiday Baking Projects Produce Learning Experiences

Those of you who follow me on Instagram have seen some of these pictures lately in my feed.  (If you don’t follow me on Instagram yet – my handle is simply rakisradresources.)

At this time of year, baking and making candy is a HUGE part of the holiday traditions in my household.  Some of the recipes we make are recipes that I made with my mom as a child, like Kris Kringles (cut out cookies with frosting) and Mexican Wedding Cakes.  However, each year we try some new recipes.  This year, we made lollipops and fudge!

As a homeschooling family, baking is about more than just spending time together and building traditions (although those things are awesome too!)  We also work on a wide range of math and science topics including measurement, doubling, and heat.  We work on safety and talk about the chemical reactions that are going on while we are cooking.  Sometimes we talk about how cooking and ingredients have changed throughout history or why certain foods are considered holiday foods.  For example, pumpkin and apple pie are traditionally cooked for Thanksgiving because they are seasonal produce of the season, just as watermelon is seasonal to Independence Day.  The conversations that we have while baking are priceless for building background knowledge and understanding. While it is slightly easier to do these projects with my small group of 3, I have done cooking projects in the classroom setting too, with groups as large as 30 or 40 kids. 

Last year, I worked with a group of teacher bloggers to put together a Holiday Cookbook for Kids.  The recipes inside are perfect for classroom or homeschooling atmospheres.  The cookbook is available as a free download from my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

What cooking or baking projects will you be doing with kids – in school or at home – this year?

The Holiday Dilemma

 

Around the holidays, teachers forums light up with questions and comments about what to teach about winter holidays in public schools.  Questions generally surround around not upsetting parents, and whether it is really a part of the curriculum.  For most curriculums, holidays are NOT a part of the curriculum – for better or worse.  However, this doesn’t stop most teachers from including holidays in their activities during the winter months.  Generally, we integrate it into our writing, our read alouds and of course build in some fun, crafty activities.

Personally, I think that holidays should be a part of our curriculum, not as a craft opportunity, but as a teaching opportunity - as long as they are presented in a way that promotes acceptance of people and understanding of cultures.  When Christmas is presented as the only holiday that happens this time of year, it leaves out a part of your population and gives those who celebrate Christmas the idea that everyone in the world is the same as them.  This does a disservice to both groups of children – those who celebrate Christmas and those who don’t. 

Holidays present us with the opportunity to let kids discover cultures around the world that they didn’t even know existed.  It also provides us with the opportunity to show students that cultures and holidays are more similar than they are different.

When I was teaching 1st grade at an American school in Morocco, I was asked to prepare a song for with my students to present in the “Winter Holidays Show”.  I looked around at my options, knowing I didn’t want to sing a Christmas song with a population of students who were mainly Muslim.  The winter songs like “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” didn’t make much sense either – not in a country that only sees snow in one or two mountain towns.  By chance, I stumbled across a song called Eid is Here on YouTube.  This song was based out of India and talked about Christmas, Eid and Diwali.  What I loved most about the song was that it talked about the things in each holiday that were the same.  Each holiday gave people a chance to:  wear new clothes, eat special foods, spend time with family and friends and use special lights.  While my students and I learned the song, we were able to learn about different holidays, but compare how they were similar.  This was a concept that the kids easily grasped and one that allowed them to see each other in a new light, as someone who did things similar to how they themselves did things.

 

This experience encouraged me to write the reader’s theater: Light Up the World with Celebrations for a similar group of children.  Before we performed the reader’s theater, we learned about a large variety of celebrations from countries and cultures around the world who use light as a part of their celebrations.  I presented the information to my students using my Winter Holidays Power Point, and then we created a chart to help us compare and contrast different holidays.

 

   

Last year, I worked with some bloggers from around the world to create a Holiday Cookbook for Kids, full of recipes that are often found at holiday celebrations around the world, as special foods is another common feature of holiday celebrations worldwide. 

 

No matter what holidays your students do or don’t celebrate, knowing about holidays celebrations around the world can help your students to identify that celebrations are a time for people to get together with family and friends, eat special foods, have special lights or decorations, wear special clothes, and be happy as a group.  You may also talk about charity to others, as this is a part of many, many celebrations worldwide. Ignoring holidays in the classroom prevents true conversation about different cultures and pigeonholes students into thinking that all people are – and should be – the same. 

So, during this winter holiday season, be sure to discuss holidays and how they bring people together.  Include diverse holiday stories, encourage students to share how they celebrate different holidays, invite in guest speakers, do research on new holidays, watch videos about how holidays are celebrated in different countries, and throughout it all, encourage your students to look for those common themes that bring people together to celebrate and be happy.

 

Holidays Around the World Website

It’s time for the Wednesday Website suggestion!! For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the Wednesday Website suggestion.

It’s that time of the year when people start to think about the Winter Holidays.  If you’re looking to teach your kids about holidays celebrated around the world than the BBC has a great section of their website that is just for you. 

In the World Religions section of the BBC website, there is information about each of the six main religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism.  In addition to general information, there are lessons and worksheets for teachers to use and there are links to even more specific information about holidays and festivals of each religion.  For each holiday, there are activities and worksheets as well.  Here is an example of a worksheet you can find for Ramadan. 

This website is a great addition to a unit on world holidays.  If you’re looking for more holiday resources, you can find a ready made Power Point, reader’s theater and vocabulary packet about how light is used in holidays around the world at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

       

Teaching about holidays in other cultures is a good way to introduce students to the concept of global thinking and understanding that not everyone in the world is the same.  How do you introduce this concept to your students?

A Holiday Treat for Free

It’s December!  I can say Happy Holidays!  First, I have to say sorry to anyone who was here over the last 24 hours and was asked to enter a password.  My blog was hacked for a bit, but it has been all cleared up now!

Today, I am excited to announce the arrival of the 2012 Winter Holidays Tips and Freebies E-Books!  There are 4 of them, divided by grade level:

 

 

Grades 7 – 12

Grades 3 – 6 (Featuring me on page 38!)

Grades 1 – 2

Grades Pk – K

Each book contains 30 – 50 pages of holiday tips and links to holiday freebies created by the teacher authors at Teachers Pay Teachers, and each and every book is completely free!!  Stop by and get yours today and don’t forget to send the links on to your teammates or other teachers who might benefit from a free holiday lesson or two (or almost 200) during this holiday season. 

Happy Holidays!

Winter Holiday Show Preparation

Sorry I’ve been so absent guys!  I promise I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, just into Holiday Show Preparation mode.  I teach at a small school, so in addition to teaching my Grade 3/4 classroom, I also teach Drama to all of the kids K4 – 4th.  So, that means I am in charge of our Holiday Show, which is coming up way faster than I anticipated!  Throw in the fact that we don’t have one full week in November due to a combination of Moroccan and American holidays, and I’m down to the wire to get my kids ready. 

Here’s my plan – this week we will begin learning about the holidays that our show covers with a Winter Holiday Powerpoint Presentation.  As we talk about each holiday, we will pause a moment to act out the important pieces of each celebration.  This should take up the entire time of each drama class, as there are many, many holidays discussed during our holiday show, including Christmas, Haunakkah, Kwanza, Diwali, Ramadan, St. Martin’s Day, St. Lucia’s Day and New Years. 

Next week, we will begin to learn our lines.  Each student K5 – 4th has a talking part, but most of the parts are short and sweet.  My two strongest 4th graders will play the narrators with the most lines.  The name of our show is Light up the World with Celebrations – a Truly Multi-Cultural Holiday play.  (Grab a free copy from my TPT store.) I wrote it specifically for my students, because I wanted to have a play that highlighted the truly International community that we have at my school.

Also next week, the K4/K5 teacher, who is also the music teacher will begin working with the students on our two songs – This Little Light of Mine and Silent Night in 4 languages.  We’ll also be singing Happy Birthday in 4 languages, but we already sing those regularly, so that should be no sweat.

In the next few weeks, my students will be creating lanterns, luminaries, fireworks and candlesticks to use as decorations for the play.  We will create some of these in art class, and some of them during our class time – math lesson integration!  (Measurement, Geometry – it all works out!)

Finally, the week before we deliver the play, the oldest kids – Grade 3 & 4 – will do a more intensive study into four of the winter holidays with our Winter Holiday Vocabulary Packet.  (Grab a free copy from my TPT store.)

Holy Smokes are we going to be busy between now and Winter Vacation.  And, in addition to that, I have just started 3 new novel studies and we have to complete our soils and erosion unit – Yikes!

What’s your class/school planning for the holidays?