Christmas Career Lessons

Just in time for the holidays, I'm doing lessons in each grade level incorporating Christmas activities and a career focus. I have seen many of these ideas on other blogs and Pinterest, but here is how I've incorporated them! I love building upon the magic of the season.

Kindergarten: We read How Santa Got His Elves and applied to be Christmas elves! They were so excited to have elf finger prints (a non-toxic kid stamp pad!) One student told me he was going to leave his application out with the milk and cookies for Santa to see if he could get the job.

1st Grade: We read Snowmen at Work and illustrated our snowmen to fit with a career we'd want to have. Each student then displayed their snowman on the projector and had their friends guess what career it was - we talked about the tools and outfits to include as evidence for their chosen career.

2nd Grade: We read How Santa Got His Job and talked about strengths that help us be good at our job. Students filled out a Substitute Santa application.

3rd and 4th Grade: We had a discussion about how one finds a career and descriptive adjectives that we would want an employer to know about us if we were an applicant. We applied to be one of Santa's reindeer.

5th Grade: We talked about the job search process and students worked together to create a classified section of a newspaper looking for various Christmas jobs.

A Wrinkled Heart

I think the image of a wrinkled heart is a powerful one to help students visualize the way our words affect others. In first grade this week we are learning about put-ups and put-downs. I read the story Bad Apple and discussed how Mac felt when the other apples were being mean to him. One of the things I like about this story is that we do not see the behavior of the other mean apples change in the book when Mac is different from them, but we do see Mac and Will supporting each other as friends in spite of the unkind words. So often students must decide how to handle the teasing when changing the mean kids is not in their circle of control. They are able to empathize with Mac in the story and relate to the feelings of sadness and loneliness he feels when being teased. I do want all students to be empowered to choose kind words and recognize the staying power of their words.

After our discussion, I wrinkled a heart each time a child told me something mean someone had said to them until it was a crumpled ball. I tried to smooth the heart back out with some of the nice things they say to each other. But we compared the heart with wrinkles to a smooth heart and discussed how we can never fully erase all of the mean words from our memory.

Students made a wrinkled heart craft as a take away from the lesson. They cut out the heart and put in some wrinkles since those mean words were on it. Then they wrote kind sayings on band-aids and glued them over the mean words. This activity is available for download here.  

Kid President's video "20 Things We Should Say More Often" is a perfect end to this lesson!