--Originally published at Language, Literature, & Inspiration

Now that I have turned in my final papers and projects for the semester, I am able to relax during the second half of December for the first time in years. In the classroom, the weeks leading up to winter break always required an exhausting amount of ingenuity as I designed educational activities exciting enough to engage students distracted by visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.

Last year, I created a couple of activities that satisfied my requirements for educational value and my students’ desire for holiday fun.

• Activity #1 Holiday Carols Mad Libs – In this activity, students review parts of speech while creating amusing mad libs out of lyrics from popular holiday songs.
• Activity #2 Winter Scattergories – Based on the board game, Scattergories, this activity requires students to think of winter-themed words starting with each letter of the alphabet. Though this activity is mostly just for fun, it also helps students brainstorm winter words and topics for the next activity.
• Activity #3 Winter Story Board – In this activity, students review plot elements and exercise their creative writing skills as they complete a story board for original winter-related stories (snowboarding snowmen, holiday mysteries, evil reindeer…the possibilities are endless!).

The handouts and accompanying PowerPoint are included below. Happy Holidays!

PowerPoint: Winter Mad Libs!!!

Handout: WinterMadLibsandStoryBoard