When looking for holiday writing activities for your upper elementary class, look no further than these Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts
When you get the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts, you are firmly establishing that in your classroom, every day is going to be a holiday.
Featuring a variety of holidays, including “Make Your Dreams Come True Day” (January 13), “National Origami Day” (November 11), and “National Cereal Day” (March 1), the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts are high interest, fun writing practice, and easily adaptable for a variety of classroom needs and activities.
Although pretty simple in concept (read about and write about an obscure holiday each day), because the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts are editable and created in both digital and printable versions, they add many different opportunities to your classroom experiences.
In fact, these prompts can be easily embedded into many of the classroom activities you’re already doing every day.
How to ADD Holiday Writing Activities into your Already Established School Day
With a new, high-interest topic to focus on each day of the year, the writing prompts in this resource can be used in a variety of contexts. Also, there is no rule stating that you must use them daily. You could cover all of the March holidays over the course of a single week or let students choose the specific holidays they want to learn about.
Here are a few different places you may want to embed or implement these holiday writing activities into your already established school day
- Morning meeting
- Writing response
- Writing station
- Writing warm up/ELA warm up
- Morning work
- As an intro for holiday theme days
In all of these situations, the writing prompts are ready to use and can be presented on paper or on a computer for students to work through.
Other Holiday Writing Activities to Try
Want even more ideas for how to use these holiday writing prompts? We’ve brainstormed a few other fun activity ideas that you could use to add a little spice and variety to your writing practice.
Activity #1| Snowball Fight
Give each student some time to respond to the writing prompt. They have all the students crumple up their sheets into balls. On the count of three, let students have a little ‘snowball fight’ throwing their papers at each other for 10 seconds.
After the timer goes off, each student needs to recover a sheet, open it back up, and read the response written there.
They’ll then take a moment to respond to or add to the previous students’ comments or writing. You can then hand the papers back to the original owners, or you can repeat the process to create written ‘discussions’ among your students.
Activity #2| Easter Egg Hunt
Print off the individual Holiday of the Day Slides (printing 6-8 per sheet, so they are smaller), and then crumple up the papers to fit in plastic Easter Eggs. Then, hide the eggs for a good ol’ fashioned egg hunt. (I love this idea for April or May, depending on when Easter actually falls on the calendar.)
When it’s time to do the writing prompt, students will have to go find the eggs, open them up, and respond to the prompt inside.
This is great for months or weeks when you aren’t going to have students do the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts every day. It could also work in months like August, June, or your spring break month when there are many writing prompts you may never get to due to school not being in session.
Activity #3| Poster Gallery
Post several of the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts around the room on posters. Then give students time to work their way around the room (individually or in pairs), and write their responses to each prompt on the posters. Seeing other people’s responses will show students how other students’ opinions and experiences differ from their own.
Activity #4| Post-It Party
To prepare for this holiday writing activity, pick 3 Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts to use and post them on posters around the room. Then, when it’s time to begin the activity, hand out three Post-Its to each student.
Read through or post one of the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts you’ve chosen for the activity, and give students plenty of time to write a response on one of their sticky notes. Once they have completed their responses for the first prompt, move on to the next one. Repeat the process until students have written about all three prompts.
After writing on all three prompts, ask the students to go put their sticky notes on the posters. Divide the class up into three groups and assign one student from each group to take down the poster and read the responses to that writing prompt aloud to the rest of their group.
After reading through all the responses together, ask each group to discuss the following questions.
- What were some of the most common responses we heard?
- What responses surprised us? Why?
- How would you change your response after hearing other people’s responses?
With so many different uses and fun, high-interest topics to learn about, the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts are a great addition to your upper elementary classroom and a fun way to incorporate even more holiday writing activities into your upper elementary classes. To take a closer look at the Holiday of the Day Writing Prompts, take a quick peek at this blog post where we introduce the resource!
