"ESL Teachers' Holiday Activities Kit"

Let me share with you a fabulous teaching tool that I use in my classroom on a daily basis called the "ESL Teachers' Holiday Activities Kit" written by Elizabeth Claire. I have been using this activity book for years in my ESL classroom. ESL stands for English as a Second Language. This book includes over 175 reproducible activity pages. Each page features holidays and special events that people celebrate in the United States. The illustrations were done by Daniel Shelton, Phil Singer, David Swanson, Kevin Tinsley, and Brad Vancata. This book was published in 1990.

Holiday Activities:

• Labor Day
• Rosh Hashana
• Yom Kippur
• Citizenship Day
• The Constitution
• The Seasons
• Fall
• Fire Prevention Week
• Columbus Day
• United Nation's Day
• Standard Time
• Halloween
• Election Day
• Veterans Day
• Puerto Rican Discovery Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Hanukkah
• Winter
• Christmas
• New Year's Eve
• African-American History Month
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
• Inauguration Day
• Chinese New Year
• Abraham Lincoln's Birthday
• Valentine's Day
• Susan B. Anthony Day
• George Washington's Birthday
• February 29
• Saint Patrick's Day
• Spring
• April Fool's Day
• The Passover Seder
• Easter
• Daylight Savings Time
• Mother's Day
• Memorial Day
• Flag Day
• Father's Day
• The First Day of Summer
• Independence Day
• Arbor Day
• A Holiday In My Country
• A Holiday In ___________
• Birthdays In The United States

Includes:

• background Information
• over 500 illustrations
• reading Selections
• vocabulary Builders
• close exercises
• multiple choice
• reading reinforcement
• discussion starters
• listening skills
• key grammatical structures
• quizzes
• tests
• whole language
• tpr (total physical response)
• holiday games
• arts and crafts
• gifts for holidays
• holiday celebrations
• songs
• puzzles
• mazes
• word games
• high frequency vocabulary
• organized to school year

I highly recommend the ESL Teachers' Holiday Activities Kit. Any teacher will fill this book helpful, not just ESL teachers. I used to use this book when I taught first grade too. Many of my colleagues also use this book and love it.

Different ways use can use this book would be to first read the history of the holiday you are teaching. Then you can follow up with a booklet consisting of different activities from this book. For example, if I was teaching a unit about Thanksgiving, I would first read the history page in this book, and then give the follow up lessons that went with the unit.

You can also use this book as supplemental materials to a unit you have already planned but just needed a little extra for the students who usually finish first. This book provides so many worksheets and creative lessons that would work for theme reinforcements.

What I also like about this book is that it breaks down the lessons in a user friendly way. There might be a holiday or tradition that you yourself are not too familiar with. This activity book provides mini lessons for a quick review for you and your students.

Update:

This book would be great for any classroom, not just ESL classes. The reason it is directed towards ESL is because the students are coming into this country without any prior knowledge of American customs and holidays. The main holidays that are taught in American school , you can find the most pages of activities to choose from. The secondary holidays that are taught you can find about 8 to 14 pages. The least focused holidays you can find about 1 to 4 pages.

Each holiday has 1 to 2 pages of history taught. Each page of history includes written facts accompanied with pictures. So if you are teaching about Labor Day, the word can be traveling and next to it is a picture of a car. For Halloween there are 8 boxes of information. Each box had fasts along with a picture. They say "Trick or Treat" and there is a picture of children knocking on a door. There are 7 pages of activities that go with Halloween.

I do like all of the holidays that are included in this book. Sometimes there are too many activity pages to do so I will pick and choose which one is right for the level of my class. You can have some students work on some activities, while others do different ones. You can go according to individual levels of learning.

Personal Experience

My favorite holiday from this book is Thanksgiving. My students first color a picture of a turkey on a farm with pumpkins, apples, etc... Then we learn about the holiday using the 8 facts of information. Next we learn the meaning of the vocabulary words such as, November, families, invite, turkey, traditional, stuffing, dinner, etc... We complete the fill in the blank sentences using the new vocabulary words. We also do a matching exercises. We draw a line from the word turkey to the picture of a turkey. For creative writing we write an essay, "What Are We Thankful For?" Next we learn the about the story of thanksgiving. It starts with the year 1620 and tells about the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, etc...After we learn about the history we complete more vocabulary exercises. We even learn that verbs show action and change the form to the past tense. For example, Where did Pilgrims come from? The Pilgrims came from England. Finally, we circle the word that does not belong in the group. For a beginner level class, we can trace our hands on construction paper and make hand turkeys. We can do these types of activities for almost all of the different holidays in this book.