With Christmas just around the corner, bring some festive cheer to your online ESL classroom by incorporating Christmas-themed activities in your lessons this week! This will surely engage your students as well as provide them with cultural experiences and practical language use.

Here are nine fun and creative lesson ideas, games, and conversation starters to brighten your virtual ESL classes this holiday season!

1) Christmas-Themed Bingo

Create bingo cards with words related to Christmas, such as “snowman,” “reindeer,” “stocking,” “mistletoe,” and “chimney.” Provide each student with a digital (or printable) card. You can create Bingo cards using websites like myfreebingocards.com. Call out the words or show images on your shared screen and students can fill out their own cards. The first student to complete a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line yells “Bingo!”

2) Holiday Role-Play

Pair up your students in breakout rooms and have them practice conversational skills about holiday-related themes. For example, it could be shopping for gifts in a store, planning a Christmas party with family and friends, asking for the Christmas special in restaurants and cafes, etc. This activity encourages students to use practical language, and also teaches them how to make polite requests, ask for prices, and discuss preferences in English.

3) Christmas Idioms

Introduce Christmas idioms to your students to enhance their conversation skills and cultural understanding. You can present different idioms and ask students to guess what they mean. If you want, you could also explain the history behind these idioms. (You may have to look some of this up online!) To assess whether your students have truly understood the idioms, have them come up with their own examples.

Check out LatinHire’s article on Christmas idioms by clicking here.

4) Virtual Show-and-Tell: Holiday Edition

Christmas is a great time to have a discussion with your class about various holidays celebrated around the world. Ask students to bring an object related to a holiday that their family celebrates and explain the significance of the item as well as the holiday. They can show the object through their webcam. This is a great way to encourage students to speak up and learn about cultural differences.

5) Write a Letter to Santa

Students can practice writing skills by composing a letter to Santa Claus. They can share their wishes, evaluate their behavior over the past year (were they naughty or nice?), and ask questions about Santa’s life. For an extra challenge, students can work on persuasive writing to convince Santa that they deserve the gifts they desire! A few students can volunteer to read their letters to the whole class.

6) Christmas Carols Fill-in-the-Blank

To practice listening skills, play various popular Christmas songs like “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman” and have students complete a fill-in-the-blank worksheet as they listen to the song. You may want to play the song a couple of times so they have multiple opportunities to guess at the missing lyrics. Then, you can display the correct lyrics on the screen and have a sing-along with your class!

7) Holiday Storytelling

Write a holiday story as a class. Begin with a festive opening line, such as “On a snowy Christmas Eve, a magical snowman came to life…” Each student adds a sentence to the story and collaboratively, the class will create the entire story. This activity is great for practicing grammar, vocabulary, and creativity. You can also present an image and have students create a story based on the picture.

8) Christmas Wish List

Ask your students to create a wish list of all the things and experiences they want. You can also have them explain why they want each item. Whether it’s the latest video game or a trip to the Bahamas, it’ll be interesting to hear what students desire the most! This can tie into a discussion about needs versus wants and also practicing gratitude for everything we already have.

9) Christmas Around the World

Share short videos or articles about how Christmas is celebrated in different countries. Discuss similarities and differences with students’ own traditions. This activity fosters cultural awareness and provides rich discussion opportunities. Students can also share their own family traditions, even if it’s not something normally practiced in their culture.

Check out LatinHire’s article on how Christmas is celebrated around the world by clicking here!

We hope you enjoyed this article and will apply some of these activities in your own ESL classroom. Do you have any other Christmas-themed activity ideas? Share them in the comments below!