‘Twas the week before Thanksgiving when all through the school, every teacher was looking for fun lessons to do.

Sound like you?

I know it certainly sounded like me when I was in the classroom, mainly because everyone is abuzz with the excitement of an upcoming long weekend. This is also the start of holiday season and the slide into winter break at the end of December.

While it seems everyone is feeling the holiday cheer, that often means no one is feeling inspired to work. (This includes teachers AND students!)

So, what do you do when the atmosphere is high on vibes but low on motivation?

MINI UNITS!

And I’ve got some ideas to help you through until the winter break reprieve (that you so absolutely deserve!

Break out the Creative Writing Unit

Who doesn’t love a creative writing unit?

It’s relatively low stakes. The students get to flex their creative muscles and build their writing skills. And there is lots of room in creative writing units for collaboration and group work, which helps take that charged energy from the season and put it toward something productive.

With a creative writing unit, you can start the week off with an essay, poem, or flash fiction piece that you have the students “read like a writer”. Have them discuss what worked for them in the piece and anything that stood out to them as interesting. Then, you can have the students create a piece of their own based on the anchor text.

This includes:

• Found poems
• Creative essays inspired by a theme in the anchor text
• For short stories, you can have students write alternate endings, rewrite the story from the perspective of a different character in the story, or what happened after “the end”
• Have students take their favorite sentence from the anchor text and use it as the first sentence of their own creative writing

Creative writing units are a rich way to channel the energy of the classroom, especially during this season, into something worthwhile and fun that has students analyzing, creating, and strengthening skills.

Plus, there are more than enough creative writing prompts and anchor texts to get you through to winter break!

Read/Perform a Play

The week before Thanksgiving might not necessarily be a time you want to start a new novel unit. However, have you thought about starting a play unit?

Plays are a bit shorter than novels, so you can get through one in two or three weeks (wrapping up, conveniently, right before winter break), and they are a great opportunity to use that holiday energy to have students read and perform.

Maybe not Shakespeare or Marlowe. But there are plenty of great plays that can take you through now to winter break that are rich in interest, historical context, and analysis.

• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• Fences by August Wilson
• The Crucible by Arthur Miller
• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

There are obviously plenty more plays that you can study with your students in the weeks between now and winter break. So, choose something you love (and your students will love it too!)

Time for Some Poetry

Poetry can sometime be a hard sell for students. However, poetry units don’t have to focus on the stuffy writing from days of yore (although there is some good stuffy stuff out there if you present it the right way. You know what I mean.)

Like plays, poetry is short, can be high interest, and hits all the necessary skills and objectives while being accessible during a time when motivation and attention span for work only gets lower the closer we get to winter break.

Not only can students analyze the poems, but they can also work on creating their own poem inspired by the anchor texts in the mini unit.

Some high interest poetry units:

• Spoken word unit (I found my students loved Philip Kaye, Sarah Kay, and Elizabeth Acevedo, obviously there is a world of great videos you can find on YouTube)
• Black History Poetry Unit
• Gothic Poetry Unit
• Romantic Poetry Unit

Form a Writing Group

I personally love writing groups. I love the community, the comradery, and in our English classes, whether the students like it or not, we have a built-in writing community.

Some of my favorite writing group activities (that I brought into the classroom and my students loved too) were:

• Writing prompts based on stories/novels we’d read or were reading at the time
• Pass the story, where you’d give students 5 minutes to write, then they’d pass the story they’d written to the person next to them, who would take 5 minutes to continue the story. Rinse and repeat for as many times as you want. Then, return the story to it’s original writer and whoever wants can share.
• Writing retreat, turn your classroom into a writing retreat for the next weeks until winter break. Have brainstorm sessions for story ideas. Have students bring in their favorite poems, stories, and/or essays to share with the class for “reading periods”, and help facilitate discussions about the writing and readings. Use class time to help them develop stories that they complete as a final assessment before break.

Let’s Make a Book Club

Sometimes students are more likely to do the work when they are the one choosing the work they are doing.

Welcome to Book Club!

• Give students a few different book options.
• Have students form small groups where they are all reading the same book (each group can read a different book).
• Have students create their own reading schedule and choose who is going to facilitate the group discussions during class and who is going to be the note taker during that group discussion.
• Have the students hand in their notes at the end of class. Final assessments can be an essay or analytical project about the book they read.

Book clubs are a great way to give students autonomy over their learning since they are choosing the books, they are creating the questions, and they are active participants in the conversation.

It also frees you up to walk around the room, listen in on those conversations, and, puts the ownness on the students to be prepared!

You Got This!

No matter what you decide to do this holiday season, I hope you choose to work smarter, not harder.

With all the outside stress of the holidays, you don’t need extra work stress added to the pile.

If you’re looking for a la carte daily lessons that you only need to make copies of, full units to get you through the season, or assessments, I got you. Check out my store, The Bookish Classroom. I included links above to different units. But feel free to bop around, there are lots of resources to choose from!

Let me know in the comments what you’re looking forward to this holiday season!

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