Christmas Curriculum

I'm not much of a holiday celebrator, but Christmas provides a great reason to shake up the usual curriculum. I did essentially the same lesson with slight variations for differing elementary grades: we made snowflakes and a Christmas card. In kindergarten we made Christmas trees.

In one of my junior high classes we had the kids write letters to Santa. Something interesting happened: nobody requested anything from Santa. As I was reading the letters, I kept asking the kids, "but what do you want?" I was on the verge of responding to the puzzled looks when I realized it would be better if I kept that consumerist tradition to myself.

[The Zamami kindergarteners aren't allowed to get their glue until they have a piece of newspaper in hand]