Teaching math during the Christmas holiday does not have to be the same boring old math lessons your students are used to. Add some holiday cheer and spice things up a bit during those last few days of math class before the Christmas break.
Holiday Graphs and Symmetry
You can create some holiday themed graphs, and teach symmetry with pictures of snowmen and snowflakes. For the symmetry lesson, have the students create the snowmen and snowflakes first, then teach them how to decide if they are symmetrical or not. You can also make symmetrical Menorahs. Give each student a copy of half of the menorah and have them draw the other half.
Calculating Amounts for the Holidays
You can have your students design a simple light display, and then have them calculate the number of strings of lights they need based on the length of one string of lights. You can also add up all the gifts from the song The Twelve Days of Christmas. As an extension of this idea, you can have them practice multiplication and division skills with the same song.
Bring in a variety of store ads and have them go shopping in the classroom. Provide them an amount of money they can spend, and have them decide what they can purchase with that amount of money. You can also give them a list of people they have to purchase gifts for, making them think carefully about what each person would want, and budget accordingly. As an extension on this activity, you can have your more advanced students figure out how much they could save with a coupon.
Estimation Lessons
Fill a jar with candy and leave it out on a shelf in the classroom. Explain to the students that you are going to let it sit there for one week, and let everyone decide how much candy they estimate is in the jar. After the week is up, have everyone write down their estimation, and discuss together how they made their decision. Whoever is the closest to the correct answer wins the jar of candy.
Create Christmas Trees
Have your students decorate tress with shapes from pattern block templates. Then have them count up how many of each shape they used. This activity can be time consuming because the students will need to trace, cut, and glue on all of their shapes. You can have them expand on the concept of geometric principals and have them design a winter wonderland based on what they learned.
Teaching Rounding on a Sled
Teach students how to round by drawing a wavy number line that looks like a series of hills. At the top of each hill is the next 5. So the hilltops would be 5, 15, 25, 35 and so on. Discuss sledding with the class, finding out who likes sledding, what kind of sled they like, and so on as an introduction. Then teach them that rounding is a lot like sledding. If the number is 5 or higher they will slide down the hill into the next valley. If the number is 0-4 they slide backwards into the previous valley, just like you would if you were sledding on that number.
These ideas are just a few of the math topics that can be made into Christmas lessons. Whatever math unit you are teaching as you come up on the Christmas holidays, can be changed to add some Christmas cheer.
You may be interested in more math lesson ideas.
