I don’t know about you, but the weeks before Christmas are cRaZy in the classroom!  I always enjoy doing something meaningful and fun with my kiddos to celebrate the holidays, but I also have real life things to do like assessments and report cards! 🙂 #reallife

That’s why I absolutely LOVE these Christmas Around the World ideas.  It can be as simple as learning about a few countries as time in your schedule allows.  Or it can be as elaborate as rotating with teammates for a few days to travel around the world.  This year, I modified my typical classroom Christmas Around the World routines to work with our homeschooling situation in 2nd grade.

Let’s chat about our simple Christmas Around the World ideas and our fun country ornament Christmas tree project for early elementary kids!

Introduce the Country

The first thing we do is talk about the country and find it on our map.  During our homeschooling this year, we started with the United States because I think it’s important to review our own traditions before we start comparing them to countries around the world!

When I rotate with teammates, we usually all do United States with our own classroom first before rotating through the other countries.

We color in the country we will learn about and add it and its color code to our map legend!

Learn About the Country’s Traditions

Next, we watch a YouTube video telling about the country’s Christmas traditions.  Why a video and not a book?  I LOVE a good book, but most of the videos I have found have someone from the country telling about the traditions.  I like that we can hear the accent of the people from each country and see an actual person from the country we are studying! (You can find the list of all of the videos for FREE in the preview here.)

After we watch the video, we write about the information we learned on the country’s Christmas ornament.  Each ornament has a flag that tells kids how to color it, a place to write how to say, “Merry Christmas,” a list of Christmas foods, the name of the Christmas “gift giver,” and the Christmas traditions for the country.

Christmas around the world Tree

In the classroom, I would choose one ornament to hang on our classroom Christmas Traditions Tree.  But since we are doing the homeschooling gig this year, my 2nd grader gets to put all of his ornaments on our tree!

**NOTE: The sad thing about homeschooling is there’s not a good way to get butcher paper.  So I got some green wrapping paper to use.  It’s not as wide as butcher paper, so the ornaments are a little crowded.  (And I didn’t have room for a bigger version anyway!)  If you are lucky enough to have access to butcher paper, you will be able to make a bigger tree to fit all 9 ornaments on! 🙂

Read a Story

After we finish the Christmas around the world ideas and ornaments, we read a fiction story from the country we learned about.  We talk about the elements of the stories since many of them are folktales.  But we also listen for and discuss connections to the traditions from that country that we already learned about.

For the United States, we read Christmas in the Big Woods.  I loved having the chance to talk about how traditions can also change over time, even in the same country with this story!

After we read the story, we wrote about the characters, setting, traditions we heard about and the lesson learned about Christmas from the story using this gift graphic organizer!

You can find all of these Christmas Around the World ideas in this resource!