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?