Teachers are about to embark on the black hole that is the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The kids are crazy, mid-year testing arrives, and everybody is dealing with holiday stress. It can be hard at times to keep everyone focused and engaged. So, the week before break I change things up and work on a little program with my kids. It keeps them engaged, and it's a nice gift from me to the parents. I've set it up so it doesn't take away from instructional time at all. We rehearse a fun dance that I choreographed as a brain break throughout the month of December, and I play the song we'll be singing as our clean up song starting the day we get back from Thanksgiving break. The piece de resistance is our reader's theater.

We practice during our literacy block for a week before the performance, with a special focus on fluency. Reader's theater is a proven method to improve literacy skills in students, plus they love it. My kids look forward to their performance more than their parents or I do.

I know that not everyone is allowed to celebrate Christmas or other holidays in their classrooms, and I've been there. Different schools have different rules surrounding holidays and many times individual students and their families come with a diverse set of beliefs that we need to respect. With that in mind, I have two reader's theater scripts and themes for the week that I use depending on the circumstances.

The first is a traditional Christmas theme where I use this book for shared reading. I modified the story for our Christmas reader's theater. You can find that reader's theater here. For our song, we sing and sign this song.

Starting at 1:05.

When I have restrictions on holidays I stick with a Gingerbread theme. For shared reading, we read several versions of the Gingerbread Man and compare and contrast them. Here are some of our favorites:

The Classics version

The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School

The Ninja Bread Man

Our reader's theater is one I based on several versions of the classic tale. Here it is if you want to use it...

The song we sing with this one is Jingle Bell Rock.

I do the same dance for both. It works for either because it doesn't have any lyrics. I do my own choreo but you can use the Just Dance version easily.

We also make sure to serve snacks. The parents contribute, and the snacks match the theme. Christmas tree cookies for Charlie Brown, and of course Gingerbread man cookies for the Gingerbread man!!

The time we spend working on and performing our programs builds great memories for all my kids and their parents. Plus my administrators love it too. It really puts the fun back in the holidays for us! I hope you find some fun here too!