Inside: Use this Christmas Light Writing Activity: You Light Up this Room to connect Christmas, writing and social emotional learning.
In a classroom of 20-35 students, it’s easy for students to feel lost or feel like they aren’t valued as a member of the class.
But if we want our kids to feel heard, seen, valued, welcomed, and liked, we have to intentionally make sure they know how much we hear, see, value, welcome and like them.
We can create a Compliment Box in our classrooms where students write notes to each other like these Compliment Cards.
We can also use these Lift You Up Balloon Notecards and these Educator Notecards to Connect with Students.
We can build them up in summer with these Compliment Suns and in spring with these Friendship Flowers.
But during December, we can use this Christmas Light Writing Activity: You Light Up this Room to build up our students’ confidence and self-esteem.
Christmas Social Emotional Learning Activities:
We can connect social emotional learning to any holiday, any season and any learning skill.
That’s why it’s so easy to “sneak” in social emotional learning because it can be taught at the same time as other skills.
To connect Christmas to social emotional learning, we can read this Christmas Kindness Emergent Reader and spread Christmas Random Acts of Kindness.
We can countdown to Christmas with a Kind Act each day with this paperchain Christmas Kindness Countdown.
We can practice being kind with this Christmas Role Playing Cards and sort kind and unkind actions with this Christmas Kind or Unkind Sort.
We can also read these Christmas Kindness books:
Two Lists for Christmas: The Christmas Kindness-List
Secret Santas And The Twelve Days of Christmas Giving
And we can use this Christmas Light Writing Activity: You Light Up this Room to build up self-esteem and work on complimenting others.
How to Use the Christmas Light Writing Activity: You Light Up this Room
1. Download and print out the holiday lights you wish to use: color or black and white and I light up or You light up on cardstock (download it below).
Write students’ names on the back of the lightbulb.
2. Brainstorm positive adjectives or attributes we could use to describe classmates on the board such as:
- hard worker
- fun
- funny
- kind
- friendly
- good friend
- good at ____
- creative
- helpful
- thoughtful
- generous
- athletic
- responsible
- joyful
- caring
- curious
3. Have students go around the room and use the board for inspiration to write one positive adjective/phrase on each classmate’s lightbulb.
Encourage them to use different phrases so the same phrase isn’t repeated over and over on the same light bulb.
4. If you write in pencil, you can trace over the words in sharpie.
5. Each student can also write one positive thing about themselves on their own light to help build their self-confidence.
6. To share the positive words, encourage students to read what their classmates wrote about them and remind students that all together, everyone helps light up the classroom and make it special.
7. Cut out the lights.
8. Tape the lights to string or ribbon.
9. To display the Christmas Lights, you can:
- make a garland that can be hung up on a wall or across a room.
- attach them to a bulletin board as a decoration or down the hallway.
- bind the students’ lightbulbs into a classroom book to put in your classroom.
Download the Christmas Light Writing Activity here.
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