Do you need some fun December activities for elementary students? Keeping students engaged in December can be a challenge. Kids are excited about upcoming holidays, winter break, and weather changes. Teachers might find that if they slightly tweak their traditional lessons, they can have a smoother day while keeping kids learning!

3 Fun December activities for elementary students

Here are three great ways to have fun during December. These resources are highly low-prep and can be used for several weeks.

1. December Poetry Activities
2. December Writing Prompts
3. Holidays on a Budget

December Poetry Activities

This fun December poetry activity contains reading skills and short yet funny poems. Readers can learn different reading skills like:

• Visualization
• New Vocabulary
• Infer within the text
• Main Idea
• Figurative Language
• Point of View
• Using Text Evidence
• Theme

Ideas of how to use this December Poetry Activity :

1. Assign partners and have students read the poem to each other.
2. Students can take turns reading stanzas or reading the entire poem several times
3. Students can identify different rhyming patterns or styles of the poem
4. Students can discuss features they enjoy in each poem
5. Send students back to their desks to complete the questions and writing reflection pages

December Writing Prompts

This December Writing Prompts activity can help students write narrative, expository, persuasive and descriptive papers. There are many different colorful projects inside that kids can pick from. You can spend a week brainstorming, coloring, completing the graphic organizer, and writing the paper.

Ideas to use December Writing Activity:

1. Day 1- Have students select a cover that they love and spend a class period generating ideas, coloring, and sharing what they wrote with a partner or a friend in the classroom
2. Day 2 – Complete the graphic organizer and begin a rough draft
3. Day 3 -Finish the rough draft and share it with a friend. Students can spend some time editing each other’s work.
4. Day 4- Students can write the final draft and color the paper if they finish early.
5. Day 5- Have students who want to share their stories share with the class.

Holidays on a Budget

Holidays on a budget can be an eye-opening project for students to see how much the holidays can cost. Students will see how quickly these events can add up to be a costly season. The beauty of this project is that a teacher can spend a small amount of time at the beginning of each class explaining what students will do for the day. Then students can work in partners or groups to complete the assignment.

Ideas to use Holidays on a Budget:

1. Assign groups or partners to every student in the class.
2. Explain the project to students without going into detail about daily tasks & assign a budget. I like to give students a relatively large budget so that they can see how quickly money can be spent.
3. You can put the project in a file folder for organization. I like only to give the pages that students will be working on each day to the students. That way, you can monitor student progress and ensure they complete their project correctly.
4. Once students complete the project, they can present it to the class if they like.

I hope that you have found some fun December activities for elementary students to keep the month running smoothly!

You can also find me on TeachersPayTeachers! Click here ➜ for Marcy’s Mayhem.