Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Solstice, Christmas, Ōmisoka, New Year’s Eve…with abundant holidays and traditions involving food, gifts, and socialization, December offers teachers many opportunities to engage students in fun and reflective writing activities.

As I wrote last month in my November post, in addition to supporting students’ ability to write grammatically, we should be helping them build fluency in their writing. What better way to encourage them to write more and with greater confidence than facilitating their writing about people, places, and activities that are meaningful? In this month’s post, I offer a few writing activities for learners of varying proficiency levels. Depending on your students, these activities can be implemented in a single lesson or extended across several weeks as process writing projects. They can be kept private (in a journal shared only with the teacher), shared with family, or posted publicly on a class website. Continue reading →