Holiday Traditions Around the World

In December, we spent the last few weeks before Christmas break learning about holiday traditions around the world. We began our study by, first, making a passport. Inside our passport, we included our name, age, hometown and grade level along with a picture. Once our "official" passports were complete, we were ready to begin our trip around the world!

1st stop: Israel

We learned that in Israel, most people celebrate Hanukkah. Hanukkah lasts for 8 nights and during each night of Hanukkah a candle is lit on the menorah. We made our very own tissue paper menorahs. We also lit a candle each of the 8 days of Hanukkah on the menorah in our classroom.

One of our favorite things to do was practice spinning a dreidel and graphing which side the dreidel landed on.

2nd stop: Germany

In Germany, St. Nicholas day is celebrated. The children in Germany place their shoes outside of their doors with the hope of a visit from St. Nicholas. If the children are good that year, St. Nicholas will place fruit, candy and nuts inside their shoes. If they are not good, however, St. Nicholas will put potatoes in their shoes instead.

On St. Nicholas day, we lined up our shoes outside of our classroom. To our surprise, St. Nicholas paid us a visit and gave each of us a new pencil, chocolate and a candy cane!

We also learned that the tradition of bringing an Evergreen Tree inside of your home for Christmas began in Germany. We created our own Evergreen Trees and decorated them with jewels by lining construction paper strips from the smallest to largest.

3rd stop: China

In China, we learned how families decorate their houses during Christmas with paper lanterns and paper chains. We made our very own paper chains to decorate our classroom with. We learned a lot about team work while making these paper chains.

We strung the paper chains from the ceiling in our classroom. It was one of our favorite things during this study!

4th stop: Mexico

We learned that in Mexico, Christmas is called Navidad. We learned about the Christmas flower called a poinsettia. We made paper poinsettias by cutting paper and gluing the petals together.

5th & final stop: United States of America 

We have many different holiday traditions here in America. We were surprised to see that many traditions that we do here in the United States were taken from other countries. We had fun talking about traditions that we have in our own homes. We talked a lot about Santa Claus and his reindeer. We pretended to be Santa's newest reindeer and glued antlers to our head and added sparkly red nose to our faces. I think that we have a class of reindeer that could give Rudolph a run for his money!

To celebrate our learning about holiday traditions around the world, we held an open house on the last day of school before winter break. We invited our families to come and see our hard work from our world travels. It is always great to have our families come and visit our classroom to see all of the things we are learning in Kindergarten!