Christmas Carols…Grammar-Style!

I love love LOVE Christmas and all of the festivities that come with this special season. In the classroom I love weaving fun and festive activities into our curriculum – but not at the expense of important instructional time. I am a big fan of activities that support what we’re learning in the classroom, but also sprinkle a little Christmas magic throughout our day.

Each December I take a week and replace our regularly-scheduled language arts lessons with something fun and festive:

Christmas Carols…Grammar-style!

Christmas Carols are widely-known, easily relatable, and bring Christmas cheer to any classroom. Pair them with some grammar practice and a creative writing outlet – sounds like a win-win to me!

To start off the unit I play three well-known Christmas Carols to jog my students’ memories (as if they haven’t been playing on the radio non-stop)
Jingle Bells

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Then we spend a few minutes reviewing the basics parts of speech. I don’t know about you, but I find that no matter how many times we go over what a verb is, the kids always need a refresher.
We refer back to our Grammar Interactive Notebooks and make sure to keep them on hand for easy reference all week long:

You can check out more about these print-and-go foldable interactive notebook foldables here:

Then, once the parts of speech are fresh in our minds we crank up the tunes! We focus on one Christmas Carol per day – I hand out the activity sheet and let the kiddos go to town, color-coding their pages by the correct parts of speech. Each Christmas Carol has three different versions, so you can differentiate baed on the different ability levels you have in your classroom:

The difference between the three versions is in the directions and the different parts of speech that the students are required to underline. This allows the teacher to give different instructions to different students based on grade level, ability, and academic expectations. Level “A” asks students to identify nouns and verbs. Level “B” asks students to identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Level “C” asks students to identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, and articles.

You could also progressively increase the challenge level for your entire class – give them all Level “A” on the first day, Level “B” on the second, and Level “C” on the third day.

Also included in the packet are differentiated creative writing prompts that ask the students to write a story in response to a prompt and underline the different parts of speech that they used: