I love doing this activity with my students. The beauty of this lesson is that you can assess students on use of vivid language but on their appropriate levels! So, this fun and festive assignment is great for a variety of ages!
Should you be hunting a writing activity to go along with the Christmas or "Winter" season, this is a great one!!
You'll find guidelines, suggestions, a grading rubric, a pre-writing template, and a rough draft handout to help guide the students through the very important writing process!
The focus is on writing, obviously, so an ornament is included in activity only to serve as a visual supplement. So, the ornament creations are left entirely up to the students -HOWEVER they choose to make them should be JUST PERFECT.
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Grading Rubric &
Rough Draft Handout |
Eliminating any limitations leaves the doors wide open for creativity and imagination, encouraging students to utilize available materials they have at home. I discourage store bought items in order to cater to student imagination and it helps with those who are unable to go buy materials to make ornaments. The purpose of the added craft is to create a visual supplement that is totally homemade by gathering items lying around the house...the result being a creation representative of the child's Christmas/Winter term assigned!
A super festive idea is to string some colored lights across the top of the dry erase board, a tree, or just across your classroom wall, hanging the ornaments on the lights (or hang them on fishing line if you are afraid to hang them from light strands... lol).
Poof! Automatic Christmas/Winter display, student work display, and festive fun all crated by the students...no work on your part!
In addition to the ornaments on display, you can put their poems up too, under the lights/ornaments or on wall around a tree, depending on which way you'd like to display it all!
Oh, just a little tidbit...I use the terms "Christmas" and "Winter" because many students in my classes over the years have different beliefs and/or religions and I do not want to single anyone out or offend anyone--so if considering it our "Winter Poetry" writing assignment handles that issue.
---AFTER ALL, the purpose is to write a poem about an assigned word, stay on topic, and dazzle the reader with vivid language in connections with an assigned term. And, the visual display (craft) is supposed to represent the student's term! So, it hardly has to be dedicated solely to Christmas, which allows us all to take part in the fun writing/craft activity! You can find this item in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store or in my Teachers Notebook Shop! (Those links are on the top right of blog--or click images to go straight to the TPT product!)
I ASK YOU...
What do you incorporate as seasonal fun into your lessons?
Please share some ideas below!! Who knows, if enough ideas are out there, we could keep the kids involved in seasonal fun until we are on Winter Break!
Happy Writing,
