The countdown to the break is on and now all you need to do is find engaging before winter break activities for your middle school ELA students. If this is a scenario that sounds familiar to you, then keep reading. Winter break, or Christmas break as I often call it out of habit, is one of the best parts about being a teacher. Getting much-needed time off to check everything off your to-do list before Christmas is a wonderful perk, but the days leading up to winter break in a middle school classroom can be stressful and chaotic. They don’t have to be, though! These winter break activities are festive AND keep your students engaged and focused.
There are ways to bring a little fun and festivity into your classroom without sacrificing valuable learning time. Being strategic about any fun activities you use in the classroom will have the best outcomes for you and your students. I worked in schools where administrators sent out emails that explicitly stated that they expected students to be engaged in work and learning (and specifically said no word searches) through the last day before the break. That is actually why I began creating this line of seasonal and holiday resources to begin with!
A quick note: My Christmas reading comprehension resources are some of my best-selling activities, but I know some teachers are looking for activities that don’t center around Christmas, so I’ll share ideas from both my Christmas activities and my winter activities.
Help build background knowledge with differentiated reading passages.
Reading comprehension is an incredibly complex cognitive process, and background knowledge plays a larger role than I once realized. I’ve created differentiated reading passages about a wide variety of topics. Not only do these reading passages provide great reading comprehension practice, they also help build background knowledge in your students. If you’re looking for before winter break activities that address this, I have passages about winter sports, Santa Claus, and Reindeer.
Address vocabulary gaps with context clues practice.
Students who struggle with vocabulary have a hard time understanding what they’ve read. Ensuring that your students are skilled at using context clues to determine the meaning of words they don’t know will help them become stronger readers. I created these context clues color-by-number activities to give students practice using context clues in a fun way and they are perfect before winter break activities. I have both Christmas and winter versions of these engaging activities that also make fun student work displays!
Give your students before winter break activities that give practice making inferences in a fun and engaging way.
Making inferences is especially important in middle school because texts become far more challenging. Students will regularly be exposed to passages written by authors that don’t explicitly state everything, and in order to comprehend the passage, students need to be able to infer. My text message analysis activities provide quick and fun inferencing practice using text message conversations. Your students will read short text message conversations and make inferences based on what they’ve read. They also must cite evidence to support the inferences they’ve made. This is one of my most popular resource lines, and I have both Christmas and winter versions available.
Even the best teachers (and I’m sure that’s what you are!) struggle with those long days before winter break. The combination of exhaustion and excitement can make for incredibly stressful days! These standards-based before winter break activities for middle school are a great way for both you and your students to ease back into the routine. I’ve even created winter and Christmas money-saving bundles of these resources!
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