By Dr. Carol Salva
The holiday season is quickly approaching, and it’s an exciting time for those who celebrate all kinds of holidays. Many schools will buzz with excitement as teachers, students, and families celebrate holiday traditions that are important to them. Holiday parties in elementary schools are not unusual, and secondary teachers might display decorations or deck the halls around their classrooms. It is a significant time of year for many. It is also a great opportunity to bring your classroom together in a way that helps students learn a bit more about the world around them, sharpen critical thinking skills, and feel as if each one of them matters in the classroom.
Why Address Holiday Traditions?
Honoring holiday traditions goes beyond having a fun party or putting up beautiful decorations; recognizing and celebrating students’ traditions can also support their academic success. Motivation, for example, is an important reason to connect with our students on a personal level and help them feel valued. When you became a teacher, someone likely told you that relationships are important. The research bears this out: Cultivating relationships does have a positive impact on student motivation for language learners (Escalante, 2018). Fostering a healthy emotional connection to language learning determines drive and effort (Matis et al., 2024). And Larry Ferlazzo, author of the Student Motivation Handbook (2023), has published a great deal about the direct connection between relatedness and intrinsic motivation. Holding students (and their traditions) in high esteem has also been shown to support not only the persistence of multilingual learners, but also the persistence of our students with limited education (Salva & Matis, 2025). When we recognize students’ traditions, we are doing more than having fun. We are creating conditions that encourage greater engagement in both academic content and language learning.
Where to Begin? Know the Guidelines.
When celebrating holidays in the classroom, teachers should follow their school and district guidelines. If holiday celebrations are not permitted, educators should respect those policies. This post offers ideas for learning about traditions that don’t require specific celebrations of one holiday over another. The idea is to be mindful about creating meaningful experiences for students. But you must do that within your allowable guidelines. If you are uncertain about policies, be sure to ask your administrators.
Once you have approval to address holiday traditions, be thoughtful about how you do so. It is wonderful to have students from different cultures and backgrounds in our classrooms; here are a few practical ways to make diverse groups of students feel valued and included.
Your Students and Families are the Best Resource
A wonderful place to start is with your students and their families. A simple form can reveal so much! A questionnaire can ask if there are any holidays, traditions, foods, stories, songs, or celebrations they would like to share with the class. Students may not feel comfortable being the spokesperson for a culture, and each family is unique. So instead of singling out a different culture, you might ask every student to share a favorite holiday tradition. You might emphasize that these could be holidays or traditions that are celebrated at any time of year. It is also critical to remember that not every family celebrates religious holidays, and some may choose not to take part in certain activities. These inquiries can be optional, as students should never feel like they have to explain their beliefs or participate in something they aren’t comfortable with.
Critical Thinking Skills: Learning Vs Celebrating
Honoring different cultural backgrounds can look more like a learning journey instead of asking all students to celebrate a holiday. Researching winter holidays might have your class reading and writing about Hanukkah, Three Kings Day, Kwanzaa, and Christmas, to name a few. This can have students comparing cultural celebrations (not ranking or prioritizing) to find similarities and differences. Students can answer questions about the holiday’s history, who celebrates it, and how it might look different depending on the country or area of the world. There are many reading, writing, and critical thinking standards that can be met when a class conducts research.
Depending on your learning or language standards, you may be able to go a step further and gamify the learning. For example, in a language development class, the goal is to help students become more fluent with a target language. Students do a great deal of critical thinking when they create assessments, such as by writing quiz questions about their traditions. This allows you to honor traditions while reinforcing test-taking strategies such as identifying distractor answer choices. Language practice can include choral reading of questions and answers. An activity like this has students working at the analysis level when creating the quiz. Choral reading of answers or questions can also reinforce syntax, grammar, pronunciation, and more as students play and learn about each other’s traditions. This Kahoot blog post offers the steps to this type of activity.
Enjoy the Season
It may be helpful to focus on themes of kindness, generosity, gratitude, and seasonal changes as we look to connect with all of our students. But if you are able to share about holiday customs and celebrations, it can be meaningful for all of your students and families. By lifting up a variety of cultures and holiday traditions, we can make sure that every child feels respected, valued, and truly part of the class.
References
Escalante, L. B. (2018). Motivating ELLs: 27 activities to inspire & engage students. Seidlitz Education.
Ferlazzo, L. (2023). The student motivation handbook: 50 ways to boost an intrinsic desire to learn (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315208824
Matis, A., Barnes, S., & Seidlitz, J. (2024). 7 steps to a language-rich, interactive world language classroom. Seidlitz Education.
Salva, C., & Matis, A. (2025). Boosting achievement: Reaching students with limited or interrupted formal education. Seidlitz Education.
