Using Holiday Songs to Enhance Lessons
Ways to incorporate music into your lessons during the holiday season.
By Deborah Reynolds
Holiday songs can serve as the inspiration for creative lesson plan ideas. This is not just for the music teacher. These songs can be incorporated into any subject area. One song can be used for a math, science, and history lesson. Since many kids already know the lyrics, holiday songs can be an easy way to teach students a particular topic.
Each song has special elements that lend themselves to great lessons. The "Twelve Days of Christmas" can be used to practice sequencing. "White Christmas" can be played as an introduction to a unit on types of weather. Students can research the amount of snowfall in their area and create a graph of the amount of snowfall since the year they were born. "Deck the Halls" can be used for a vocabulary and word study lesson. Students can look up bough, deck, apparel, don, troll, and heedless, and study the meaning and word origin. "Frosty the Snowman" makes an excellent visualization lesson. The snowman is described throughout the song, so students can visualize and illustrate the descriptions. You could teach a lesson on sound using "Jingle Bells." Students could use bells to create various sounds and rhythms. They could even make their own bells using jars, cans, or other items. The students could then predict which item would make the loudest ring. You can also use all of the up-tempo holiday songs for jumping rope, skipping, and other physical education activities.
Holiday songs are not just for listening. They can make any lesson fun and interesting during the holiday season. There are an abundance of songs which can provide many new activities for the winter months.
Holiday Songs and Activities:
Students choose a favorite Christmas carol. They research it to find out how it originated. Then, they create a drawing based on the songs. This lesson contains several adaptations so that the lesson can be differentiated.
Re-Name that Tune: A Vocabulary Activity
Christmas carol titles are re-worded using words with the same meaning. For example, The "Twelve Days of Christmas" is 288 Yuletide Hours. The students use context clues, dictionaries, and a thesaurus to identify the title of the carol.
Will There be a White Christmas this Year?
This lesson involves probability, research, graphing, and maps. Students research the historical data of fifty cities and plot the percentage of times they had a white Christmas. They graph the results and create maps.
This lesson contains six activities that can be done with the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas." One activity involves sequencing the order of the gifts received. Students can also create a rap version of the song. A writing assignment consists of writing about what happened the twelve days after Christmas.