Christmas

Santa Claus is coming to town

Children don't want to return to school because they want to play with all the games that they have received during these holidays. Therefore, I have been thinking about some activities for the first day at school. Every child will want to talk about all the presents that Santa Claus and “The Three Kings” have given to him/her so it is a good opportunity to work with the different skills in a fun way.

• Do you like Christmas? Why?Which is your favourite day of the Christmas' period?
• Do you celebrate New Year's Eve where you live? New Year's Eve means the last day of the year, 31^st December.
• What do you do on New Year's Eve?
• Do you have a special dinner or party?
• Do you make New Year's resolutions? Tell us your New Year's resolutions for 2013. I think students do not know the meaning of resolution so we are going to try to define it in English and give some example:

• When children behave well during the whole year, at Christmas, Santa Claus and “The Three kings” give them presents. Have you been a good boy/girl this year?

These questions are enough to do the activities. Children are put into small groups with the aim of every child having the chance to talk with the others. We want children to talk about the questions in English. Teacher should observe different groups and if he/she sees that children do not know how to express something, teacher will help them. This is a free activity, but the structures and vocabulary are limited. Therefore, teacher helps children to complete the exercise. Otherwise they can feel lost. With this activity:

• Students will work on questions and answers. They will work on listening and speaking.
• The communication is encouraged.
• Intonation, stress, facial expressions, etc. are worked. Both verbal and non-verbal communication are important in this kind of activities.
• Language is practised in a particular situation, in this case, Christmas.
• Pupils can say what they want and they can also choose the way to say it.
• This activity is connected with real life situations.
• Mistakes will not be corrected. We want pupils to understand each other.

If teacher observes that children are motivated by this activity, he/she can take the advantage of also working on reading and writing skills. After the dialogue, they can write the information about Christmas in their notebooks. They can do a summary with the main ideas and write their opinions about these holidays.